Graeme Brown spent his career in Australian education — first as a high-school mathematics teacher, then as an assistant principal — before moving into editing. In 2014 he co-founded Global English Editing with his son Brendan, and he shares oversight of editorial standards at The Expert Editor. He writes about the parts of writing that reward patience: the slow work of revision, how to actually finish a piece, and what reading widely over a lifetime teaches you about clear language. He brings a teacher's instinct for making ideas land with readers.
Every so often a manuscript arrives with a research folder attached that's several times the length of the piece itself: interviews transcribed in full, a dozen papers annotated in the margins, whole books' worth of notes distilled down to a paragraph or two that actually made it onto ...Read More
Somewhere across the manuscripts I've turned back to writers over the years — a rough count puts it near forty, though I stopped keeping an exact tally a long time ago — a pattern eventually became hard to ignore. Almost none of them were rejected because the underlying idea ...Read More
Most of the manuscripts that cross my desk use one horizontal mark for three different jobs. A writer will hyphenate a compound, punctuate an aside, and indicate a page range with the same little dash, usually because their keyboard makes the shortest one the easiest to reach and ...Read More
A book I taught for the better part of two decades reads like a different novel to me now than it did in my thirties. Same paperback, same underlined passages from years of lesson planning, same chapters in the same order. What changed wasn't the text. It was ...Read More
My wife can finish a novel in an afternoon and tell you exactly how it made her feel. I have never been able to read that way, and after a career spent first teaching and then editing, I have stopped apologising for it. I read slowly, and I ...Read More
When a writer sends a finished manuscript for assessment, they usually expect one of two verdicts: it's ready, or it isn't. What they get back is neither. A manuscript assessment is not a mark out of ten and not a line edit. It is a reader's report — ...Read More