Editorial services

I offer a variety of freelance editing services, including proofreading, copy editing, structural and stylistic editing, fact checking, manuscript evaluation, technical and academic editing, and translation (Dutch to English). I can accommodate Canadian, American, and U.K. spelling and style. See my descriptions of editing tasks to get a better idea of what kind of editing you’re interested in, but the best way to figure out what kind of editing you need is to send me a sample of the manuscript and explain what you’d like done with it. I will provide you with an estimate of the time and cost required, and we can go from there.

The editing process

In addition to the information provided for the estimate, I’ll also need:

• Your contact information.
• The entire document to be edited.
• A schedule for deliveries: when I will deliver the initial edit, when you will send back any revisions you’d like checked, and when I will send back the final edit.

If the editing is done in a Word or OpenOffice document using track changes I send:

• One clean copy of the document. This version will have all the changes incorporated in the text of the document and is ready to be printed out.
• One copy with the changes highlighted using the track changes feature. By displaying the changes, you can go through and view all of my changes and choose whether to accept or reject each one. You will also see my comments, which I use for questions or remarks about the text.

Document formats I accept

• MS Office
• OpenOffice or LibreOffice
• PDF
• HTML
• plain text (.txt)
• LaTeX
• WordPerfect
• Pages
• hard copy (paper)

Substantive editing involving a lot of changes can only be done in editable documents (for example, a Word or OpenOffice document not on paper or a PDF). If you need substantive editing on a paper document, the first step will be to transcribe it into digital format.

How to pay

I accept personal cheques, money orders, bank transfers, Interac e-transfer, or PayPal payments. I ask for an extra fee to cover PayPal and bank transfer fees.

Security of your documents

Usually clients send me their documents by email, but if you need better security than that, I can use sFTP (secure FTP) or SSH to transfer your manuscript, or I can accept a file encrypted with GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard). If you prefer another method, let me know and I can probably accommodate you. Your document will be edited on a computer running Mac OS X. This machine runs a firewall and does not normally have any external services open (i.e., web server or FTP server). I regularly apply security updates to this computer.

I don’t want to make a project late because of a hard drive crash or other failure, so I use version control and make regular on-site and off-site backups. To protect the confidentiality of your documents, the off-site backups are encrypted with GnuPG.