Nature Writers Editing and Proofreading Services

There is a particular kind of sentence that nature writing produces and no other genre does: beautiful, weather-filled, and about nothing in particular. The light does something to the water. Birds are described as birds. It is real writing about a real morning, and a reader who knows the place will finish the paragraph without having learned that you were there.

We work on what nature writers produce — books and book proposals, essays and long-form pieces, columns and nature diaries, field notebooks worked up into prose, landscape and place writing, species accounts written for general readers, environmental and conservation argument, memoir framed around a landscape, submissions to magazines and anthologies, and the material that goes out to agents and editors. Our editors work on the specificity of what is on the page.

Naming is where nature writing becomes trustworthy, and vagueness is the failure that costs the genre most. A reader who knows a hedgerow can tell within a page whether you do, and the tell is never lyricism — it is whether the things in the sentence have names. We work through manuscripts so species are named where naming adds information, since "a small brown bird" is honest if that is all you saw and "a dunnock, working the base of the hedge the way they do" is a different sentence written by someone who was paying attention; so the season, the hour and the weather are specific because they determine everything else, given that a wood in February at four o'clock is not the wood in the essay's title; so the writer's own presence is accounted for, as an observer describing a scene with no observer in it is making a choice worth making deliberately; so the emotion follows the observation rather than preceding it, because a paragraph that tells the reader the place is beautiful and then describes it has already spent the effect; so metaphor is used where it does work the literal cannot, since a genre this saturated in simile rewards the writer who occasionally just says what happened; and so any ecological claim is as precise as the description. Manuscripts edited this way convince the reader you were actually standing there.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including manuscripts, field notes and unpublished work. We are editors rather than naturalists or ecologists, and we offer no view on your identifications, your science or your conclusions. What we can do is make the writing as exact as the morning was.