Sensitivity Reading Editing and Proofreading Services

A sensitivity read is commissioned when a writer has depicted an experience they have not had and wants to know whether it lands. The work is contested in public and frequently misdescribed by people who have not read one — as censorship, as a veto, as a compliance exercise. What a good report actually does is closer to a specialist consultancy read: here is what this depiction will look like to the readers who have lived it, here is what is doing the damage, and here are the specific places it could be fixed. Whether the author acts on it is theirs to decide.

We edit what sensitivity readers, publishers and authors produce — sensitivity and authenticity reader reports, reader briefs and scoping documents setting what the read covers, publisher guidance on commissioning reads, reader agreements including fee, credit and confidentiality terms, in-house guidance for editors receiving a report, response and revision documents from authors, style and terminology guidance for specific communities, guidance for reading in areas the reader shares partially rather than fully, and publisher policy documents describing how reads fit the editorial process. Our editors work on the report as a piece of professional writing, not on the judgements in it.

The report's framing determines whether the author can use it. A report that reads as a list of objections produces defensiveness and gets partially implemented at the sentence level, leaving the structural problem in place; a report that hedges everything to avoid seeming prescriptive leaves the author unable to tell what actually matters. We work on these so the reader states their standpoint at the top — what they can speak to and what falls outside their experience, since no reader represents a community — so each observation names the passage, describes the effect on the reader who shares that experience, and distinguishes an inaccuracy from a stereotype from a portrayal that is accurate but carrying more weight than the book has earned. We put the two or three things that matter most at the front and the small terminology fixes in an appendix, and we make explicit that these are observations for the author to weigh. Reports written this way get acted on, which is the only measure that matters, and they protect the reader from being blamed for a decision they did not make.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including unpublished manuscripts and reports. We are editors rather than sensitivity readers, and we offer no view on any depiction, on the substance of a report, or on whether a book should change. What we can do is make the report clear, well-structured and usable.