Brendan Brown founded The Expert Editor in Melbourne in 2012, after completing a Bachelor of Laws at Deakin University and working as a writer. He built it into a professional editing service used by academics, authors, and businesses across Australia and beyond, and later founded its international sister company, Global English Editing. Brendan is a co-founder of Brown Brothers Media, the company behind The Expert Editor, where he oversees both editing brands. He sets the editorial standards that apply to the company's client work and this blog, and reviews articles before they are published.
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
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
I ask writers to do one thing before they send me a manuscript they think is finished: read it aloud, start to finish, in a room where they can hear their own voice. Most haven't done it. Some resist the idea outright — it feels theatrical, or slow, or beside ...Read More
The first draft of a chapter comes out of a writer in a rush some mornings — messy, but moving. Then the second pass arrives, and the same writer sits in front of the same document for an hour and produces four changed sentences. Ask them what happened ...Read More
Most writers who submit manuscripts for editing understand their argument. They know what they want to say. The chapters hold together, the reasoning is sound, the research is there. And yet the prose doesn't work. It resists the reader at every turn — not because the ideas are ...Read More