My Editorial Services
If you need an editor or a guide in writing, I'm the one. Why?
  • 33 years experience writing essays, poems, stories, teaching material, and a memoir.
  • Practical expertise in editing and teaching how to organize and structure ideas in well-written English.
  • Working knowledge of speech preparation and delivery.
    • For more detailed information about editorial services offered, click to reveal or collapse these links.
    FOR NON-FICTION
  • Organizing ideas and concepts.
  • Defining and developing themes.
  • Stating a thesis and its supporting points.
  • Creating structure for a work.
  • Crafting paragraphs within structure.
  • Presenting evidentiary support.
  • Identifying areas needing more support.
  • Making a persuasive presentation.
  • Using narrative when appropriate.
  • Giving a work overall unity.
  • Following written English usage rules.
  • Designing visually effective formats.
  • Giving credit to sources.
  • Editing and polishing.
    		•
    FOR FICTION IN PROSE
  • Understanding one’s inner need to write.
  • Writing as therapy and working through.
  • Identifying and developing objectives.
  • Forming themes that mold the work.
  • Deciding the role of morality, if any.
  • Deciding on the role of psychology.
  • Separating the author from the narration.
  • Determining the size of the work, e.g.,
    scenarios, stories, small or large novels.
  • Creating characters
    about whom readers will care.
  • Deciding who should be characters.
  • Determining who is to speak.
  • Giving characters their roles and traits.
  • Controlling characters versus allowing
    characters to develop on their own.
  • Creating plot and subplots.
  • Describing versus implying:
  • How much is to be left to the reader?
  • Creating settings.
  • Using symbols.
  • Creating satifying closure.
  • Leaving room for more.
    		•
    FOR POETRY
  • Understanding one’s inner need to write.
  • Choosing between Emily Dickinson,
    Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes,
    and Gwendolyn Brooks, or no one.
  • Understanding the power of
    individual words and levels of meaning.
  • Painting versus graphing.
  • Identifying objectives and framing themes.
  • Narrating, describing, commenting
    and other aspects of message.
  • Creating multiple layers of meaning.
  • Using images and symbols.
  • Structuring.
  • Deciding who speaks and how.
  • Leaving the reader with what one
    wants to convey and suggesting more.
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    Teaching Experience as Training for Writing and Editing
    In each of the courses I taught, in addition to content, I also taught the skills needed to write an excellent essay. Because students usually did not have such skills, I had to teach them how to structure an essay, how to do an expository outline, how to format their essays, and the basic rules of written English. For every course I generally required at least four essays with outlines. Needless to say, but worth saying, teaching all this also honed my own skills in organizing ideas, structuring, writing, and usage!
    When grading papers, of course I graded for content and meeting the assignment. I also graded for organization, outlining, paragraphing, sentence structure, clarity, usage, sense, and persuasiveness.
    When correcting essays, I asked myself the question, “In this essay, how well did the student organize and clearly express his or her ideas, from beginning to end?” I taught students not to put roadblocks in the way of the reader’s understanding. Borrowing an image from a former teacher, I encouraged them to think of their reader as an older reader who might get confused, go get a cup of tea, and not come back if he or she could not clearly understand what was being presented. I also told students to try to put what was in their minds down on paper as clearly as they could, so that their ideas would pass into their readers’ minds as closely as possible. The essay is the medium.
    Correcting papers can be tedious, but for a serious student it is an excellent learning experience. I think I graded at least 14,000 essays over the years! By the time I ended my college teaching career, I had learned to edit and correct on all levels as I went along. I had also learned a great deal myself.