If you've completed a manuscript of your own, perhaps for submission to a journal or direct dispatch to your printer, you may wish to have it reviewed and marked-up by a professionally trained and qualified proofreader.

The longer your work is likely to remain in circulation, or the greater the prominence it is likely to receive, the more important this becomes.

I'd be pleased to arrange for your manuscript to be checked by the proofreader I use myself on longer manuscripts demanding an 'academic publishing' level of accuracy. With degrees in both Classics and English, and professional training as a proofreader, she offers thorough and intelligent checking and editing.

We can offer 2 services in this area. As there is sometimes some confusion between them, it's worth taking a moment to clarify them below.

Proofreading involves reviewing your text for spelling mistakes and formatting errors, and identifying these to you. We do this generally by accepting a Word .doc file from you, and returning a tracked version of this to you, so that you are able to consider, and then accept or reject, the changes.

We are, however, also able to provide traditional proofreading, whereby your printed-out manuscript is hand marked throughout the text using standard proofreading symbols.

Copy Editing your draft

While proofreading involves reviewing your text for spelling mistakes or formatting errors, copy-editing is a procedeure in which changes are suggested to improve the flow and consistency of the writing. The benefits of this are increased ease of reading and improved comprehension.

Copy-editing includes all the checks and corrections provided in proofreading, as well as: the querying of sentences that don't appear to make grammatical or logical sense; the breaking- up of long or confusing sentences and elimination of unnecessary words; the ensuring of consistency throughout your document in the treatment of names, titles, abbreviations and acronyms, numbers and dates, and variant spellings.