We offer developmental editing services, French-to-English & English-to-French translation, and mentoring for academic authors across the disciplines.
We are especially committed to early career and first-generation scholars.
Developmental Editing
What is Developmental Editing?
Unlike a press editor (who shepherds your manuscript through the publication process) or a copyeditor (who is typically one of the last people to edit your manuscript, and who works with the writing at the sentence level), a developmental editor can help you at various stages of the manuscript to help you strengthen your arguments, structure, and prose. We tailor our services to your needs and can accompany you throughout the entire process of developing, drafting, and publishing your manuscript.
Here are some of the things that we do:
At the beginning of your project
- We can help you brainstorm the direction and shape of your project through written or videoconference consultations.
- We can help you develop a research plan, including identifying relevant primary sources (including archives) and developing secondary source bibliographies.
- We can help you develop a research workflow, including consultation on how to best organize, save, and catalog your archival sources so you can easily find them later.
In the middle of your project
- We can help you develop the outline and framework of your manuscript, and help you find strategies to beat “writer’s block” or anxiety about getting started on your project.
- Whether at the beginning and middle of your project, we can help clarify your arguments, strengthen your prose, and organize the flow of your ideas into a compelling whole, with particular attention to your intended audience.
- Once you have written a draft, we can help you develop a plan for revisions.
- This can be through an editorial report that provides detailed suggestions for revision, or through direct intervention in the manuscript.
- We are happy to work with authors who have not yet submitted their manuscript as well as those who have already received peer review reports or other suggestions from mentors or colleagues and need assistance parsing them and developing a plan for revision.
- We can help you develop your book proposal and/or book synopsis.
- We can identify presses, journals, or other publication outlets that would best fit your project and publication goals.
After your manuscript has been accepted for publication
- We can work with you to edit the final versions of your manuscript for publication, including line editing, editorial suggestions, fixing citations, etc. (We only do final stage copyediting for clients with whom we have already worked on a project at an earlier stage, but we can help you find a specialized copyeditor if that is the main service you require.)
- We can help you with the permissions process for images, texts under copyright, etc. as well as in finding appropriate images that fit your budget, people to help you develop maps, charts and graphs, or other additional elements for your manuscript.
What Types of Manuscripts?
- Books (monographs, textbooks, essay-collections, etc.)
- Journal articles or book chapters
- Book proposals
- Public-facing writing for non-academic audiences: If you seek to publish your research for a broader, non-academic audience, we can help you strategize potential venues and revise the content, structure, and tone of your manuscripts for a wider public audience.
- Grants & fellowships: If you wish to apply for local, national, international grants and fellowships, we work closely with you to develop a clear proposal, focused on the particular funding you seek.
- Promotion & tenure Materials: We can help you develop clear narratives for research, teaching, and service that highlight your achievements and clarify how you meet the standards for tenure & promotion at your institution.
Our Levels of Service
Standard
- Includes full review of manuscript and detailed report with revision recommendations (this can take place before or after readers’ reports).
- It does not include intervention in the manuscript itself
Advanced
- Includes full review of the manuscript with substantive and direct interventions in the manuscript itself.
- Includes a short report with summary of revisions undertaken or recommended.
Premium
- Includes all services offered in the Advanced developmental editing package as well as copy-editing & line-editing after revisions.
- Includes support through the entire publication process.
Any of the above services can be purchased along with consulting or mentoring sessions, which are entirely personalized to your needs. They can be purchased individually or for a flat monthly fee (see below).
Pricing
- We offer all clients an initial, free 30-minute video or phone consultation, where we discuss your needs and aims, after which we can provide you with an estimate for the cost and timeline of our services.
- Please let us know if you have a specific budget and deadline for your project and we will do our best to find a way to make it work.
- Rates may vary depending on your need for content expertise or type of project and complexity of work required.
- Be aware that our services will be priced higher if you have an urgent deadline, as we will have to move other projects back to accommodate you.
Translation
What does translation involve?
Translation is something that more and more of us consider or need to consider nowadays, either because we want to reach a broader audience for professional, political, or other reasons and wish to engage fellow scholars beyond our immediate context, or because there is a pressure to “internationalize” scholarship in a context of greater institutional and professional requirements.
At the same time, professional, institutional, or budgetary demands mean that often we choose to entrust this work to AI (such as DeepL). Yet, doing so does not always yield the results scholars hope for because, unlike scholarly translators, AI does not attend to the subtleties and naunces of scholarly, disciplinary, and stylistic norms that are specific to a particular field or specialization. This can lead to the kind of “invisible errors,” mistranslations, lack of overall coherence of argument, and “inappropriate” style. Moreover, this kind of translation may require content expertise (or the ability to quickly acquire or check particular knowledge fields). See Katherine Tossell: “La recherche “Deeplisée” ou pourquoi il se méfier de la traduction automatique” (2023).
Additionally, “translation work” usually involves some editing for “localization” (how to adapt a text to a different horizon) and conversations between author and translator as the translator seeks to capture both the content and form of the original text.
We are skilled academic translators who have experience working with both native and non-native speakers and writers.
Our Services
Translation
- French-to-English & English-to-French academic and non-fiction translation
Translation Review
- We can review an existing translation (in French or English) for accuracy, style, and genre and suggest corrections based on translation and content expertise. Please be mindful that this usually involves more than simple copy-editing and even editing.
Academic localization
- If you are a Francophone author seeking to publish for an Anglophone audience (US, UK, Canada, Australia, etc.) or an Anglophone author seeking to publish in France, we can help you revise your arguments, structure, and formatting to address the particularities of academic writing in a different cultural context.
Any of the above services can be bundled with consulting sessions, which are entirely personalized to your needs. They can be purchased individually or as a monthly flat fee (see below).
What Types of Manuscripts?
We work on the following:
- Books
- Journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia articles
- Book proposals
- Conference papers (20 minutes)
- Keynote speeches
- Public-facing writing
Pricing
- We offer all clients an initial, free 30-minute video or phone consultation, where we discuss your needs and aims, after which we can provide you with an estimate for the cost and timeline of our services.
- Please let us know if you have a specific budget and deadline for your project and we will do our best to find a way to make it work.
- Be aware that our services will be priced higher if you have an urgent deadline, as we will have to move other projects back to accommodate you. These are our “rush rates.”
Mentoring
We are both first-generation scholars and one of us is a non-native speaker and writer. As former academics who taught in Texas and Florida, we understand the often-inflexible structural conditions that shape our publication and working lives and the institutional and professional norms that are often left unspoken. As such, we aim to provide the kind of mentoring and advice that we were fortunate to benefit from as we negotiated our careers and to put our experience mentoring colleagues and students at HIS- & MSI-serving institutions to use. Our mentoring (or “consulting”) encompasses everything that faculty and scholars may need to navigate their careers, from institutional and professional demands to scholarly ones. We provide guidance and support in all of these aspects, with special commitment to early career and first-generation scholars.
Pricing
- We offer all clients an initial, free 30-minute video or phone consultation, where we discuss your needs and aims, after which we can provide you with an estimate for the cost and timeline of our services.
- Please let us know if you have a specific budget and deadline for your project and we will do our best to find a way to make it work.
- We charge an hourly rate and can work in different formats depending on your needs (weekly virtual chats, emails, project-based, upon needed or “on call”). These can be purchased individually or as a flat (monthly) fee.