Supereditor For Hire
I’m looking for writing that’s doing good out there.
After five years working as a freelance scientific editor with a major academic agency, handling hundreds of manuscripts for journal publication in statistics and econometrics, and a previous 12 years as a supervising subeditor in national newspapers and magazines in Johannesburg, I am now available for direct hire for editing jobs of all kinds. I’d be delighted to help writers here on Medium.com.
I can handle scientific and mathematical material at any level, although my training is in physics and applied mathematics. I have a special interest in radio astronomy. My editing has included papers on political and economic modelling at all levels; game theory; climate economics; demography; knowledge transfers and spillovers; corporate structures; historical geopolitics; transport optimization and many others. I am open to editing material on virtually any subject, as long as it is written in English (UK or US).
Having handled many policy and research documents for major international organizations, including United Nations agencies, national ministries and Cabinet offices, I am able to produce documents that comply with any specified format and style.
I have a background in the philosophy of language — my own research involved science classroom discourse analysis, and for 17 years I worked in education as a high school maths and science teacher, university physics lecturer, and education researcher. I have vast experience in communicating complex technical material in accessible ways.
As a public service, I am writing a series on newspaper editing and fact checking, titled Edit High. This series emphasizes that editing is a true oversight process, evaluating documents at many levels.
My basic rate is US$ 30 per hour. I am generally quite fast, depending on the quality and difficulty of the writing. Most of my academic editing has been for Japanese, Korean and Chinese authors, so I am used to working with people writing in English as a second language.
I offer the following services:
(1) As an essential process, I provide a “dynamic screening” of your manuscript: I give it a one-hour perusal, and provide as much honest advice on as many aspects as I can; and I give you a quote to edit the document fully. This dynamic screening will cost you $30. If my suggestions are minimal, you can complete the editing yourself; if I feel that major work still needs to be done before the document is ready for editing, I will do my best to guide this.
(2) If you so decide, I then do the complete editing job for the quoted price, within an agreed deadline.
(3) After you have checked the edited manuscript, I do any corrections, adjustments or proofreading as required, at $30 per hour, or $5 for each 10 minutes, since I turn these corrections around very fast. You only pay for the full job at the end of this process, when we are all happy with the document.
I live in the Kingdom of Eswatini in southeast Africa. Payment will be via a South African bank account or PayPal.
The dynamic screening guarantees that your document receives one solid hour of undivided attention from a professional editor. Do not underestimate the value that an experienced editor can bring. This will also establish a payment channel should you ask me to do the full assignment.
By my lights, worthwhile writing these days should be seen to be doing some kind of good in the world. My aim, in all the editing I do, is to identify this core of “good” and to sharpen and amplify it as much as possible. I have a very light approach to editing, and I strive by all means to keep the author’s style intact and my editing as invisible as possible.
Email me at 3da0km (at) gmail (dot) com. You can send me a small sample or outline of the writing, and I will tell you immediately if I’m available to do a dynamic screening for $30. We can take it from there.
I take privacy extremely seriously and have an encrypted email account should this be needed. I am also happy to be couriered a flash drive for highly confidential work. All my editing is done on machines that are never connected to the Internet and are kept highly secure. At present I work in Microsoft Word, although I can upgrade as needed to handle PDFs and other formats.
I take jobs of any scale; if you have a major book that needs editing from beginning to The End, we can negotiate a suitably discounted rate and I will be happy to consider working on it for however many months it takes. Just as long as I’m convinced that it’s going to do some good out there!
