Editorial services

I can accommodate Canadian, American, and UK spelling and style. See my descriptions of editing tasks for more information about these editing tasks, or send me a sample of your manuscript and tell me what kind of editing you have in mind. I can give you an estimate of the time and cost, 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 I do the editing in a Word or LibreOffice document using track changes, I can send two versions of the document back if you prefer:

• 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.
• One clean copy of the document. This version will have all the changes incorporated in the text of the document.

Document formats and software

To avoid problems with document conversions, especially with long or formatting-intensive documents, I try to use the same software as my clients. Here are the file types and software I can work with:

• MS Word: I have Office 365 with MS Word version 16.80. I can work with .docx or .doc files.
• PDF: I have Adobe Acrobat Pro 2020 so that I can work smoothly with professional graphic designers on electronic proofreads. It allows the most compact and unambiguous markup and provides a checklist of all the edits in the document. I can also use it to convert PDFs to Word documents, rearrange pages, and split and merge PDFs.
• Adobe InDesign: I can edit directly in InDesign, which may be a good option for very layout-intensive documents.
• LibreOffice: LibreOffice is a free word processor with advanced formatting and track changes functionality. LibreOffice also handles a variety of other file formats such as WordPerfect, so I may be able to handle older or unusual file formats.
• LaTeX: I can use Overleaf or similar LaTeX editing tools.
• I can also work with Pages, HTML, plain text (.txt), or hard copy (paper).

I recommend that substantive editing involving a lot of changes be done in a document format that allows easy editing (for example, a Word or LibreOffice 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 secure FTP (sFTP) or SSH to transfer your manuscript, or I can accept a file encrypted with GPG (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. It runs a firewall and does not normally run any external services (such as a 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 lost document, so I use version control and make regular on-site and off-site backups. To protect the confidentiality of your documents, my off-site backups are encrypted with GNU Privacy Guard.

Insurance

I have workers’ compensation insurance through WorkSafeBC.