Editorial policy

We sell careful writing, so our own has to be held to a standard you can inspect. This page sets out how the guides on this site are written and checked, and the rules our editing follows on every project.

Who writes the guides

Every guide is written by working editors, the same people who edit client documents, and published under the Refinery Editing name rather than an individual byline.

Nothing here is written to fill a content calendar; a guide gets published when we’ve seen the same problem often enough to have something useful to say about it.

How guides are sourced

Where a guide relies on a fact or a figure, it comes from a primary source: the style manual itself, the publisher’s own guidelines, the original research, or the legislation. We link to the source so you can check it, and where the primary source is behind a paywall we say so.

We don’t cite secondary summaries when the original is available, and we don’t rely on facts that will be out of date in a year. Guides about AI-assisted writing in particular rest on reasoning that stays true rather than on the state of any tool this month.

Where we draw on what we see in client work, we describe the pattern and never the client. Nothing on this site identifies a document or an organization we’ve worked with, named or otherwise.

Keeping guides current

Each guide shows the date it was published and, where it has changed since, the date it was last reviewed. When a source changes or a guide stops reflecting how we work, we update it or take it down.

Our use of AI

We use software for mechanical work, and that can include generative tools, but we don’t publish anything a qualified human editor hasn’t read line by line and taken responsibility for. Every claim in a guide has been checked by a person against its source, and every position in it is one we hold.

The same rule applies to client work. Tools support mechanical tasks; they never replace an editor’s judgment, and a human editor is in the loop on every change.

Independence

We don’t publish sponsored content, and no guide on this site has been paid for or placed by a third party. We don’t earn commission from any tool or publisher we mention. If a guide recommends something, it’s because we use it or would.

What we won’t publish

We don’t publish case studies or client names, and we don’t draw examples from client documents, even anonymized. Worked examples in our guides are written for the purpose.

We don’t publish guides on how to beat an AI detector. We think that the tools don’t work, and we’ve explained why.

We don’t publish anything a student could use to pass off work as their own.

The standards our editing follows

The guides describe how we think about writing. The editing itself is governed by a small set of rules that apply to every project, whoever the client is.

We work in tracked changes, and we deliver tracked changes only. Every change is visible and reversible, and anything that affects your meaning or your argument goes in a margin comment for you to decide on. We don’t send clean copies with the changes accepted, because reviewing them is part of the work.

We quote before we start, and we agree the scope with you. You tell us what the document is and what it has to do, and we settle the scope together before any work begins. We don’t decide it on your behalf.

We check references as standard. Every reference is checked for consistent formatting and for whether the source exists. Whether each source supports the claim it’s cited for is developmental work, and we quote it separately.

We don’t take work aimed at lowering AI detection scores, and we don’t run documents through detection or plagiarism tools of any kind.

We don’t ghostwrite for students. Work submitted for a degree has to be the student’s own, and we stay well clear of that line. For everyone else, we edit within whatever rules your institution or funder sets.

We don’t guarantee outcomes. No editor can promise publication, a grade, a won contract, or a funded application, and we won’t. If we miss something material, tell us and we’ll put it right at no charge.

We don’t discount. Our rates are published and the same for everyone, and if a quote doesn’t fit your budget, we’ll adjust the scope with you rather than the rate.

Your document is confidential. It’s shared only with the editor working on it, and we’ll sign an NDA if you need one.

Most of these have a longer answer on the FAQ page.