The Expert Editor has been editing academic papers, books and business documents since 2012, and we have been writing here since 2013. The blog answers practical questions writers face before and during an edit: What is the difference between copyediting and proofreading? What does a manuscript assessment look at? Which kind of edit does a draft need? We explain these things as we would to a client—plainly, specifically and with the needs of the draft in mind.
Every article is reviewed and approved by our editors before publication. You can read more about how we work in our Editorial Standards.
Before you read any further, try this. Think back to the last time you sent something you'd written, a chapter, a proposal, a full manuscript, off to be edited. What did you brace yourself for? Most writers I've asked over the years give some version of the same answer: ...Read More
English runs on borrowed words most speakers never think twice about. Kindergarten came from German. Karaoke came from Japanese. Déjà vu and zeitgeist and schadenfreude arrived, kept their original spelling, and simply moved in. Meanwhile, for every word that survives the crossing intact, thousands of others get quietly swapped ...Read More
"The inability to 'see' revision as a process: the inability to 're-view' their work again, as it were, with different eyes." That is composition scholar Nancy Sommers, writing in 1980, long before anyone edited a manuscript inside a colored overlay of insertions and deletions. She was describing student writers ...Read More
Ask a roomful of writers what makes a sentence good, and most of them will land, sooner or later, on the same word: shorter. Cut it. Trim it. Get out before you've said too much. It's advice I've heard in newsroom style sheets, in composition classes, and in more editing ...Read More
I have spent close to two decades reading other people's drafts, first as a writer trying to figure out how sentences work, then as an editor whose whole job is noticing what a writer almost said. One thing shows up across thousands of manuscripts, academic and creative and corporate ...Read More
A spell-checker is good at exactly one kind of mistake: the kind with a right answer. Misspell a word and it knows. Drop a verb and, most of the time, it flags the gap. But there's a whole category of comma decision that never trips an underline, because nothing ...Read More