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.
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
I marked mathematics papers for the better part of four decades — first as a teacher, later as an assistant principal who still couldn’t leave a red pen alone. When I moved into editing other people’s writing, colleagues assumed I was starting over. I wasn’t. Marking a proof ...Read More
The email that accompanies a first thesis draft is a genre of its own. It apologises for the draft’s existence before describing it. It explains that the writing is "probably not at the level you usually work with." It asks, somewhere near the end, a question the sender ...Read More
Editor's note: This article was reviewed and updated in July 2026 to focus on how these words work in writing. See our corrections policy. Editors develop a particular relationship with vocabulary. Not the spelling-bee kind — the working kind. When you spend your days fixing other people's sentences, you ...Read More