Textbook Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

A student reads the chapter, follows every line of the worked example, understands it completely, turns to the exercises and cannot do the first one. Nothing is wrong with the explanation or the example. The example demonstrated the method on a problem that had already been set up, and the exercise requires the student to set one up — a step the chapter performed invisibly and never taught.

We edit what textbook authors and their publishers produce — chapter drafts and their structure, worked examples and their commentary, exercise sets and their progression, solutions and solution manuals, chapter introductions and learning objectives, summaries and revision material, figure and diagram briefs, instructor resources and teaching notes, edition revision plans and their rationale, and proposals and sample chapters for publishers. Our editors work on the distance between the example and the exercise.

The worked example and the exercise progression are where a textbook either teaches a method or demonstrates it, and their failure is a gap the author cannot see. An expert sets a problem up without noticing they have done it. We work through these so the worked example includes the setup as steps — what was read from the problem, what was chosen and why, what was rejected — since this is the part students cannot do and the part experts perform automatically; so the reasoning at each step says why this move rather than a plausible alternative, because a step justified only by its correctness teaches imitation rather than method; so the exercises progress in stated increments, with the first exercise identical in structure to the example and each subsequent one changing exactly one thing — the numbers, then the form, then the setup, then the recognition that this method applies at all; so the exercise that requires students to decide which method to use is marked as such, given that method selection is the skill the whole chapter is for and it usually appears without warning; so at least one worked example goes wrong and is corrected, as the recovery from a wrong turn is what students need most and almost never see; so the solutions show the reasoning rather than the answer; and so the hardest exercise is flagged with what it is testing. Chapters written this way get students through the first exercise.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including manuscripts, proposals and unpublished material. We are editors rather than subject specialists or educators, and we offer no view on the mathematics, the science or the pedagogy. What we can do is find the step the chapter performed and never taught.