Why Choose J Glaser Edit?

One of my mottoes in this business is, “In service of the writer and the written word.” The aim of J Glaser Edit is to bring out the best in your writing and to get it in a form that satisfies both you and anyone else you choose to share it with. That may be a professional publisher, the editors of a trade journal, the general public, or family and friends. Each project is unique, and so is each writer’s needs. With that in mind, I take great care when approaching and handling your project, doing my best to balance needs, time, and costs.

Experience

I have been editing freelance since 2017 and have worked with a broad range of authors, mainly in academia and research. Having written several textbooks for EFL programs, I have an inside-out view of the writing and publishing process. The experience has given me a great deal of empathy for my fellow authors. I now know what it takes to produce materials to maintain interest, educate, and sometimes entertain the target audience, and to be able to achieve that requires knowledge, planning, foresight, and honesty—honesty about what works and what doesn’t, along with the courage to discard what doesn’t. The fact that you have completed a book, report, or research paper means that you persisted through all the difficulties and reached your goal. Knowing the possible pitfalls through my own writing trials and those of my former students informs my work as an editor and allows me to help you steer clear of them.

During my twenty-five years as an educator at a private college-prep school, I mainly taught classes in academic writing, research skills, and literary analysis. It was a great pleasure to see recent high school graduates take on the challenges of not just learning English as a foreign language but acquiring the skills to be able to thrive at a four-year university abroad. Along the way, I wrote primers on and prepared activities for selecting research sources, reading and annotating, planning a research paper, and peer editing. We selected the MLA style as our standard, and I regularly revised the materials to keep up with changes to the style guide. For each draft they produced, I provided in-depth feedback on content, grammar, and mechanics. Very few schools in the country had a program like ours, and I am proud to have been part of the team that designed the curriculum and produced the materials and resources that allowed learners to graduate from schools in the SUNY system and other similar institutions in English-speaking countries.

Over the years, in addition to paid work, I have worked with nonprofits, such as Gisoku, a Japanese organization that produced artificial limbs for survivors of land mines and rocket attacks in Afghanistan, and Distributed Proofreaders, which proofreads e-texts to be added to the collection at Project Gutenberg.

For my first three years at UC Davis, I intended to major in physics and took a year each of chemistry, physics, and calculus. A science enthusiast my whole life, I also took introductory courses in geology and astronomy. While studying for my original major, I took courses in German, planning to minor in it. In the middle of my third year, I shifted my minor to my major and focused on German literature. I don’t pretend to have the knowledge equivalent of a science degree, but for the purposes of editing, I do have a solid background in fundamental scientific concepts and processes.

I was fortunate to be able to work as a lab assistant for the UC Davis Entomology Department. During the five months I was there, I helped to collect data for the silverleaf whitefly project and for trials on the effectiveness of different pesticides on California almond crops. I learned a bit about IPM, Integrated Pest Management, along the way as well. I also worked briefly for ITEH, the Institute for Toxicology and Environmental Health, formerly the Laboratory for Energy-Related Health Research (LEHR). My role was minor—helping to clean up and organize things after the end of a thirty-year DOE program on the effects of radiation. Like my experience at UCD Entomology, my short time there taught me much about the inner workings of a major research project.

Later, I earned a certificate in copyediting from UC Berkeley Extension and took a course in indexing the following year. I continue to read and to attend seminars to keep my editing skills up-to-date.

As your copyeditor, I strive to be as well-informed as possible.

My aim is to help you produce the highest quality work and to get published. I give suggestions for changes to the manuscript, but those suggestions are based on an understanding of the intent and meaning of the writing and how well they fit with the overall goals of the piece. Where intent and meaning seem unclear, I may ask for a little clarification, but ultimately, the choices to follow those suggestions are the writer’s. My job is to assist, not to insist: I have faith in my abilities, but at the same time, I respect the writer’s wishes. Likewise, because my suggestions are based on academic and publishing industry standards, I expect the writer to keep an open mind at first before choosing not to follow a suggestion.

Your work and any personal information associated with it are private and never to be shared or sold. Please see the privacy policy for more details.