3CB

I am a professional editor with four years experience at an international publishing house. I have worked on school textbooks, essays and term papers right from substantive editing to proofreading.

I have worked on books in both English and Swahili, magazines and journals, poetry, fiction, blogs, and spiritual materials. The tasks done can range from mild tweaking to complete reworking of the manuscripts.

Depending on the needs of my client, I can perform simple proofreading for structure and spelling; or a more intensive copy-editing, taking into account factors like structure, layout and style.

Proofreading

This is the final check of a piece of work before it is printed, published, or presented to a client. It involves spell checking, confirming that all the pages are numbered correctly, looking for consistency in fonts, colours and images, checking that the contents page, glossaries and indices are correct, seeing that art used is appropriate, and confirming ISBN numbers. Proofreading looks into all the little things to ensure that your document looks polished and professional.

Copy-editing

This takes place once the document has been laid out. The copy-editor focuses on the appearance of the document. Things like arrangement of text, placement of illustrations, selection of font and style, structure of the content, titles, subtitles and the like are reviewed. the copy-editor also fact-checks the document for accuracy and errors in language.

Substantive editing

This involves taking a manuscript in it’s rawest form and dividing it into chapters or units, selecting a design and format, refining the outline of materials and turning it from scattered notes into an actual document. It is the most comprehensive form of editing.

Manuscript review

I will read your work, analyse it, and write a report suggesting ways to polish the work. Reviews come in two forms:

• (a) Blue edit, which is a colour-coded in-text commentary that explains clearly how certain paragraphs, ideas, bits of dialogue or concepts could be improved. In this form of review, green means grammar, red means spelling, and blue means general comment.
• (b) Straight edit, where I write general report to summarise my thoughts in an overview of the manuscript.

My work is available both on and offline, and references are available on request.