Non-Native English Manuscripts Editing and Proofreading Services

A novelist writing in English, their third language, sends a finished manuscript for a proofread. It comes back without a single error in it. The long rhythmic sentences have been divided into shorter ones, an image that had no precedent in English has been exchanged for a familiar one, and the narrator's faintly formal diction has been smoothed into ordinary idiom. Every change is defensible on its own line. Together they have removed the only thing about the prose that could not have been written by somebody else, because to an editor working sentence by sentence, what made it distinctive was indistinguishable from what made it wrong.

We edit book-length work written in English by authors whose first language is another — literary and genre fiction, memoir and life writing, general non-fiction, academic monographs, short story and essay collections, and the submission material that goes out with them: synopses, query letters, sample chapters and author biographies.

The line between an error and a choice is what determines whether editing a manuscript sharpens a voice or quietly deletes it, and its failure is everything correctable being corrected in prose whose strangeness was the point. We work through these so departures from standard usage are queried rather than silently changed, since nobody reading a single sentence can tell whether an unusual construction is a gap in the language or a decision, and only the author knows which; so the corrections that are purely corrections — articles, prepositions, tense sequence, countable and uncountable nouns — are made consistently from first page to last, given that these carry no voice whatever and leaving them spends a reader's confidence on every page; so sentence rhythm and length stay as written unless they obscure the sense, because prose carrying the cadence of a first language is often exactly what makes a book sound like nobody else, and regularising it yields competence with no signature; so an unfamiliar image is kept where it is doing work and flagged where it collides with an established idiom, since a phrase that reads as fresh on one page and as a mistake on another is the author's call to make and not the editor's; and so every decision goes onto a style sheet as it is taken, given that consistency across ninety thousand words is not a feat of memory, and a manuscript that changes its conventions at chapter forty tells an agent it was never finished. Manuscripts edited this way keep what brought a reader to them.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts, synopses and submission plans. We are editors rather than agents, publishers or writing coaches, and we offer no view on the market, your prospects or where you should submit. We will not rewrite your book into somebody else's English. What we can do is take the errors out and leave the voice where it was.