Substantive Academic Editing
Through our careful interventions, we can elevate and overhaul the scholarly register of any manuscript, helping to engage your reader as effectively as possible with your ideas, whether you are working in the high humanities or the social sciences. With Lex Academic’s substantive editing service, a PhD-educated subject expert will bond with your manuscript, making suggestions and emendations that reflect a deep understanding of your ideas, as well as your target readership. In so doing, the editor will help to clarify the respective components of your argument, reconstructing the text (where necessary) to foreground the originality of the content and elevate your authorial voice.
According to the published research (Flowerdew, 2001), major obstacles to academic publication at the highest level include the absence of a strong authorial voice and parochialism. Lex Academic’s substantive editing helps you surmount these barriers through a holistic approach that centrally involves transforming how one constructs and transmits a compelling, scholarly narrative.
We regularly work with authors following ‘revise and resubmit’ recommendations to ensure their papers hit the right notes second time around. Our substantive edits are beautifully finished by our Senior Managing Editor whose intuitive interventions never fail to bring out the best in an author’s work.
Substantive editing can include cutting documents down to an agreed length, as well as providing wholesale stylistic overhauls (e.g., adapting a paper from continental to analytic style).
Substantive editing is for those clients whose writing expects to reach a wider public, owing to which it needs to be truly extraordinary (not merely fault-free). Lex Academic’s substantive editing is proven to make an impression with academic journals and major publishers.
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As part of substantive editing, we render your work consistent with regard to formatting and referencing style. To this end, we are conversant with the dominant citation styles for business, the social sciences (including psychology), medicine, humanities, and law (including APA, Chicago, Harvard, ICMJE, MHRA, MLA, and OSCOLA). Furthermore, we readily familiarise ourselves with the peculiarities required by different university faculties for the sake of Ph.D. and DPhil submission. Just let us know your referencing style and spelling conventions (e.g., American or British English) and we can begin working our magic on your manuscript.
All changes to your text are logged through Microsoft Word’s Track Changes facility. This enables you to keep tabs on our interventions, giving you autonomy over the final draft of your work. All substantive edits are finished by our masterful (and hawk-eyed) Managing Editor, Louise Chapman, whose editorial standards are nothing short of ruthless.
We are able to edit LaTeX documents in Overleaf and PDF.
Can we help with anything else?
Ensure your entire manuscript is submission-ready with our bespoke Indexing service. We also purvey extraordinary academic Proofreading and Copy-Editing. Our impeccable author services include correcting all typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors. Where desired, we can make stylistic and substantive changes to your work that promise a powerful first impression with major publishers. Our authors have published with all of the top-tier publishing houses, including Bloomsbury, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Penguin, Peter Lang, Princeton University Press, and Routledge.
Authors or publishers interested in our services should get in touch with our Managing Editor detailing their editorial requirements and publication ambitions.
