Skeptical?
Does this Thistle person know anything about science? Is she going to sit on my manuscript for two weeks? rearrange my wording on whim? destroy my personal writing style? tell me I'm a lousy communicator?
Let me propose a test run. The next time you submit a paper, send me a copy at the same time (tell me it's already been submitted or not, as you prefer, but do let me know what journal it's intended for). Let me work it over, then judge for yourself. If you don't like my changes, no harm done or time lost--the paper's already submitted anyway. If you do, there's still time to incorporate them at the revision stage. You may be surprised at how much time and trouble I can save you if you just worry about the science and let me deal with the publication detail.
Book Editing
I have considerable experience in helping faculty members who have written books or who have, for example, hosted a symposium and are editing the resulting multiauthor proceedings volume. Anyone who has tackled a project of this scale knows how much detail is involved (e.g., putting all the manuscripts in uniform format; smoothing the abrupt style transitions from paper to paper; making sure every paper uses the same variant of neuron/neurone, focused/focussed, and toward/towards and followed the
same rules for "ten"/"10" and the serial comma and capitalization after colons; dealing with the publisher's format requirements; checking all the separate literature-cited sections or compiling one large one; constructing the index). I can free you to make just the scientific judgments by doing all this routine work. Professional editing can also save considerable production time and
expense, which can hold down the cost of the published book. If you are contemplating such a project, talk to me about setting up the optimal work-flow and record-keeping systems so that the job can go as smoothly as possible.
Indexing
I have indexed many book-length scientific publications. I can offer advice and references on the subject to faculty authors who prefer to do the work themselves, or I can simply compile the index myself. Either way, faculty authors and book editors can save a considerable amount on publication costs.
Database and EndNote library grooming
If you download EndNote or other entries automatically from electronic databases, or if you hire a student to enter them for you, they will be full of errors (particularly in capitalization, hyphenation, abbreviation, and field placement of data), which are then propagated into your literature-cited sections, together with the frequent format errors in EndNote's output templates. I will be happy to proofread your libraries for you periodically, weeding your term lists (particularly the one governing journal names and abbreviations), checking for data in the wrong fields, correcting typos and capitalization errors, regularizing publisher names, etc. I can also edit your output templates as needed, to make them actually match your journals' preferred reference formats.
Course in Scientific Writing
BSC 5936, Scientific Communication, is a three-credit-hour course, offered each spring semester, designed to teach the fundamentals of scientific writing and publishing, as well as other forms of scientific communication. It is best suited for graduate students who have data ready to be written up for publication, but scientific writers at a wide range of levels should benefit.
I also offer, usually in summer, an informal workshop entitled "English Grammar for Scientific Writers." The workshop is free and open to anyone.
