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DISSERTATION EDITING SERVICES

Suzanne L. Simon, Ph.D.

ABOUT

I believe that collaboration is the foundation of a strong and productive author-editor relationship. With my services, I aim to help Ph.D. candidates produce the best and most rigorous dissertations possible. Dissertation writing can be a lonely process that presents unique challenges as you weave together the research question, disciplinary traditions, literature review, methods, and analysis. I can help. I begin each editing project by meeting with the author to understand their writing goals, concerns, and objective in hiring an editor. We will develop a realistic and actionable plan based on this conversation and my assessment of your writing.

All three of my editing services are meant to ensure that your dissertation is of the highest scholarly rigor, stylistically sound, and free of distracting errors. To that end, I offer developmental editing, copyediting, and proofreading. I value each scholarly engagement as an opportunity to enhance another’s research, and I look forward to the opportunity of working with you.

SERVICES OFFERED

I offer three services: developmental or structural editing, copyediting, and proofreading. Your selection of service will depend on the stage of dissertation writing at which you find yourself.

Developmental / structural editing

Developmental or structural editing (sometimes also referred to as content editing) aims to assess the overall cogency of the document. Is the research question sound and original? Using a Venn diagram model in which the research question lies at the center, it is imperative to ask whether the literature review, methodology, discussion section, and conclusion all support the author’s unique research question. Additionally, do these overlapping areas support and complement each other? Developmental editing assesses all these dimensions and typically results in suggestions for revising and restructuring the dissertation.

In addition to editing within the document, I provide a 2,000–4,000 word summary report. This report provides both my overall evaluation of the document’s scholarly quality, as well as summary recommendations for each section.

Copyediting

Copyediting and proofreading are close cousins, but they happen at different stages and have different foci. Copyediting, also referred to as line-editing, involves fixing and improving the writing itself at the paragraph and sentence levels. It comes after developmental editing and precedes proofreading, and it requires assessing the text line by line to ensure that it is clear, clean, and of a consistent scholarly tone. That can include corrections to grammar, spelling, and punctuation; improvement of sentence structure and readability; enhancement of word choice and scholarly vocabulary; and light fact-checking or flagging of unclear ideas. Copyediting makes your writing sound natural, professional, and easy to understand—like giving it a careful polish before it’s finalized. Unlike developmental editing, which focuses on content, copyediting is devoted solely to finessing the quality of the writing itself.

Proofreading

Proofreading is the final check of a document prior to submission or publication. The goal is to catch small and distracting surface errors that have slipped through earlier stages of writing or editing. Proofreading involves correcting typos and misspellings, missing or redundant words, punctuation mistakes, formatting issues (spacing, alignment, headings, page numbers), and inconsistencies in things like capitalization, fonts, or acronym use. Proofreading is the last polish—like doing a final scan to make sure everything looks right before you press “send” or “submit.”

ABOUT ME

My Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology is from The New School for Social Research and my B.A., also in Cultural Anthropology, is from Smith College.

I was a professor at both the graduate and undergraduate levels for thirteen years. I taught Sustainable Development at the graduate level and Cultural Anthropology at the undergraduate level. I am familiar with the rigors and stress of academia; an important ingredient of future career success lies in producing a quality dissertation that you can then publish as a university press book or a set of articles.

My own book, Sustainable Development in the Age of NAFTA: Development, Politics, and Participation on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Vanderbilt University Press, 2014, available to read here) began as my dissertation. For my dissertation fieldwork, I used participant-observation and participatory action research (PAR) methods to collect data on Mexican border environmental and labor justice movements. In the book, I use this data to test the promise that NAFTA’s environmental and labor side accords would bring greater transparency and justice to the border zone and encourage Mexican grassroots democratization. In this and other research projects in southern Mexico, Ecuador, Uganda, and the U.S., I have always used an interdisciplinary approach, relying as much on political science, international law, discourse analysis, history, economics, cultural studies, and environmental science as I do on cultural anthropology.

In 2018, I began professional academic editing. I regularly review article manuscripts, dissertations, and book proposals from disciplines as diverse as the social sciences, humanities, development, and disaster studies. The vast majority of manuscripts that I review are English language documents written by non-native English-speaking scholars. Thus, I am deeply familiar with scholarly ESL challenges and opportunities. I additionally review for such top-tier journals as American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Economic Anthropology, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and Peace, Conflict and Development.

TESTIMONIALS

“Working with this editor was an exceptional experience from start to finish. Their feedback on my manuscript was not only thorough and insightful, but also deeply attuned to what I was trying to communicate. I was most impressed by their ability to edit the document at multiple levels – from structural and conceptual issues to grammar and punctuation. They didn’t just correct or refine sentences. The entire quality of my article manuscript was improved through the fine-tuning efforts of this editor.”

— Clara B.

“I really admire Suzanne for her professionalism and respect for the writing process. Her tone has always been constructive, encouraging, and collaborative, and she has a knack for finding the needle in the haystack. In that case, it meant finding my main argument buried deep within my medical anthropology article, placing it front and center, and having the rest of the article fall relatively easily into place after that. She turned what felt like barbed wire into an original and, eventually, published piece.”

— Shawo M.

“I had the privilege of working with this editor on my psychology dissertation, and the experience exceeded every expectation. Their attention to detail was remarkable, particularly given the complexity and rigor of my dissertation. They demonstrated a deep understanding of scholarly conventions, and this knowledge was made evident in all their revisions. Thanks to their contributions, my dissertation is significantly stronger, clearer, and it seems more original. I would highly recommend this editor to anyone working on a dissertation or any type of advanced academic writing that they hope to publish.”

— Lawrence G.