Nineteen years inside other people's manuscripts.

Editing in service of publication

You're here because you've made your manuscript as good as you can get it and now you want someone to make sure it meets the standards expected by agents, publishers, journal editors and peer reviewers, and your readers. That's what I do.

I have been doing this work since 2007, across disciplines, genres, and registers, and for many kinds of writer.

The throughline is the care I bring to your manuscript. Beyond grammar, consistency, and style, I edit to keep your voice intact while making sure your writing reaches your readers clearly and engages them.

Just wanted to let you know that the author was really grateful for all your care on the text. Many thanks again!

Production Editor, University of Exeter Press

I did not set out to become an editor. Until I enrolled in a master's in journalism at Northeastern University at the age of 36, it had not occurred to me that people got paid for doing the things I had always done instinctively: correcting grammatical mistakes, smoothing syntax, fine-tuning other people's writing into something closer to what they meant. Northeastern made me writing coach for the journalism department, working with both undergraduate and graduate students on their written assignments, and it was in the course of that work that I recognized editing as a vocation rather than a habit.

During a hiatus from my studies, I ran a Craigslist ad offering my services to the Boston region. My first client handed me a 600-page semi-autobiographical novel to copy edit. That was 2007, and I have been doing this work ever since.

What the work has actually involved

Nineteen years later, the work has expanded considerably from that first novel. I now work with academics, executives, and senior professionals across a range of disciplines, and the throughline across all of it is the same problem: people who think with precision and write with less of it than their ideas deserve.

The academic editing relationships are the longest single thread of evidence in my career. I have been copy editor for the International Review of Public Administration since 2008, for the Korean Social Science Journal since 2014, and for the Korean Public Administration Review since 2020.

More than ninety percent of my academic clients write in English as an additional language, which requires a particular kind of editorial attention: less about imposing a house style and more about solving the communication problem that arises when a writer's native linguistic architecture shapes their English-language prose in ways they cannot always see themselves. My own exposure to other languages as a learner gives me a practical feel for the interference patterns that shape non-native English prose. As with all editing, the work requires holding both the macro argument and the micro sentence at once, without losing either.

Thank you so much. I am really impressed at your work — I think you really understood what I am trying to convey.

Francois Mirguet, PhD Associate Professor, Hebrew, Arizona State University

On the corporate and commercial side, my clients have included Microsoft, Twitter, David Bunnell (founder of PC World and Macworld), UCLA Extension (where my work included white papers and op-eds published under the byline of senior academic leadership), Hope Ray, and Barbara Hayes. My engagement with TransImpact ran deeper than conventional freelance work; as CEO Berkley Stafford has said, my fingerprints are all over the company.

On the publishing side, I have worked directly with Management Concepts Press, Watershed Media, and the University of Exeter Press, and my author clients have been published by Taylor & Francis, Penguin, Columbia University Press, Greenleaf Press, and the University Press of Colorado, among others.

My named book credits include the Keith Byrd memoir, a blended business and personal memoir of the TransImpact co-founder, published under the cover credit "Keith Byrd with Jane Mackay." Other named credits include Ron DeLelles's Roses for Marie, the YA novel This Girl Climbs Trees, and Punk Rock Saved My Ass, for which I served as co-editor and contributed the Chestnut piece.

In 2014, journalism professor Andy Bechtel interviewed me for The Editor's Desk, a record of where the work stood at the seven-year mark. Read the interview here.