Academic editing

When you use plain language, you put knowledge in everyone’s hands.

Academic editing

When you use plain language, you put knowledge in everyone’s hands.

How we can help

We work with most types of document, from peer-reviewed journal papers, books and book chapters, to articles and corporate documents for wider audiences. We can also format your citations and reference lists according to your particular journal guidelines.

Subjects we typically handle include psychology, psychiatry, the humanities, general science and business. However, it’s always worth checking with us if yours isn’t listed here as we may still be able to help.

For those whose first language isn’t English we are a PRS-approved editor, which means that we are experienced English-language editors too.

What you get

A revised document –

  • That has been edited according to plain language principles.
  • Whose citations and references follow your chosen style guide.
  • In which correct grammar, spelling and punctuation come as standard.

A ‘tracked changes’ version so that you can review all our edits.

A document explaining what we’ve done and why, plus tips and advice.

If you’d like more information or to talk to someone, email me, Emma, at emma@phewx.co.uk or call me on +44 (0)7879 608504.

Case study

The open-access journal Medicine, Anthropology, Theory, hosted by the University of Edinburgh, publishes scholarly articles, reviews and notes on medical anthropology and related fields.

Our task was to copy-edit a series of papers, most of them written by authors whose first language isn’t English, for clarity of expression and accessibility.

‘Thank you for the brilliant work and support you’ve provided us!! Your work has been fantastic.’ – Cristina

Case study

We are also happy to copy-edit corporate documents for universities. That’s what we did for Durham University, pulling together various web articles into a series of succinct project summaries for its research brochure.

‘Thank you for sending over the content batches so quickly. It looks really good.’ – Elias

Bottom of the class

In 1999, NASA’s Mars climate orbiter, bound for the planet’s orbit, veered ‘dangerously close to the planet’s atmosphere’.

Lockheed-Martin, which helped build the orbiter, had written commands in English units (miles and pounds); while NASA, which was controlling the mission, used metric units (metres and kilos).

CNN.com

Hitting a brick wall

A US oil company spent huge sums of money developing a pesticide, only to discover that a member of its staff had already worked it out five years earlier.

The member of staff in question had written the report on his discovery so badly that no-one had finished reading it.

M. Egan (1995) Journal for Quality and Participation