I don’t like to write.

What?

This is a good thing. It means I have absolutely no desire to take an author’s words and make them my own. You can be confident that your author’s content will be more fully theirs after copyediting than it was prior to handing it off to me. I strive to be anonymous.

Language is fluid and fleeting, constantly in flux. The tricky bit is determining when the “rules” are our friends and when they are not, determining when standards of “correctness” apply and when they don’t. This involves critical thinking and cunning strategies; obsessive attention to detail, however innocuous; interminable patience; and above all, a working and worldly knowledge of language and its logic — or beguiling lack thereof.

Truly. There is no “standard” in standard English.

Being both an art and a science, copyediting is thus a craft, an elegant craft of choice that helps make content move, speak, feel the way authors intend. My role as copyeditor is to offer suggestions, not issue imperatives. All but the most elementary edits are explained in brief, conversational terms, with options for navigating forward.

I address your briefs assiduously. You and your authors have worked together intensely, an investment I honor. I copyedit no more than ten books per year, one book at a time, so as to immerse myself in the author’s world, giving them — and you, the publisher — my undivided attention. And to maintain style guide expertise, I edit exclusively per Chicago Manual of Style.

I specialize in copyediting scholarly content for the humanities, hence I am selective when accepting projects. To put forth our best collective work, subject matter knowledge, for me as your copyeditor, indeed matters.

I like to think of copyediting as that great leveler of language, allowing words and the concepts they serve — brightness, explication, definitiveness, reason, symmetry — to emerge as one brilliant whole. This is why copyediting fills me and thus makes me good at what I do.

I offer you the partnership professional publishing requires, your authors deserve, and your authors’ readers recognize and appreciate.