Line editing and proofreading

This is the service most people mean when they say editing: your draft is finished and the argument holds, and now the sentences have to match it.

We work through the document line by line, and you get it back in Word with tracked changes, so you can see every decision and reverse any of them.

What we do

Grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Readers notice this layer only when it’s wrong, so we make sure that it isn’t.

Usage and style-guide compliance. Tell us whether you’re working to APA, OSCOLA, Chicago, AP, a journal’s own requirements, or your house style, and we’ll apply it throughout. If you don’t have one, we’ll use a sensible default and tell you what we assumed.

Consistency in language and layout. We keep hyphenation, capitalization, the way numbers and dates are set, and the terms you’ve settled on consistent from the first page to the last. They’re small things, but readers notice when they slip.

Clarity and flow. We fix sentences that make the reader work twice and paragraphs that arrive in the wrong order, and we flag anything that needs your decision.

References and cross-references. We format references to your style guide and check that each source exists, since hallucinated references are common in AI-assisted drafts.

Proofreading

If you only need a final read before it goes out, that’s the same service at the same rate; proofreading simply takes fewer hours, because we’re checking rather than reworking.

Send it as late in your process as you can, because a proofread is only useful on a document that nobody will change afterward.

Where the line sits

Line editing improves the writing you’ve done; it doesn’t restructure the document or fill gaps in the argument.

If the draft isn’t working yet, or parts of it don’t exist, that’s developmental editing, and we’ll tell you so before we start.

What it costs

$60 an hour, or $70 for medical, legal, and technical content.

Billing is hourly at our standard rates. If you’re working to a fixed budget, tell us and we’ll adjust the scope to fit.