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).

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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.

AI ‘Humanizing’, AI Editing, and AI Refining

We are being approached more and more by authors who employ AI tools and programs to draft (whether partially or fully) their manuscripts. We are extremely skilled at editing all kinds of academic manuscripts and, owing to a proliferation in demand for so-called ‘AI humanizing’, we have done (and continue to do) considerable research on the syntactic and linguistic patterns frequently identified in AI-drafted work. The discovery of such patterns can lead to your works’ disqualification from publication and can also cause significant reputational damage, particularly if the peer-review process is unblinded at any stage.

Sometimes, verdicts declaring a text ‘AI generated’ are erroneous and unfair, indicating a ‘false positive’ result. Such thwarts to publishing make it all the more worthwhile to have your work carefully checked and copy-edited (whether lightly or substantively) by an experienced team of researchers and writers, such as those at Lex Academic. There are tools online and for purchase that use AI to subsequently ‘refine’ AI-generated text, but these typically exacerbate and further embed the problem, as they are based on the same LLMs. Owing to this, AI text refiners do not enable you to capably outmanoeuvre the spectre of being accused of using AI to write your work.

Lex Academic will never employ AI tools in the editing process. We have professional indemnity and professional liability insurance to the value of £10M to reflect the seriousness with which we take our editorial and research work. We have spent decades honing the skills of academic research, writing, and editing. It is our justifiable pride in these skills that make us an invaluable partner to thousands of the world’s top academics and public figures. To us, a five-star service is not merely met when our clients are happy: we likewise need to be delighted in, and proud of, the work we deliver. 100% satisfaction needs to apply on both sides of the equation.

While we understand that a growing number of institutions and publishers do accept that authors use AI tools in their drafting process, we find our clients to be uniquely discerning; they want to be certain that what they submit and publish is factually accurate, grammatically flawless, and captures their characteristic writing style and voice.

Please get in touch with us if the above describes your situation. We would be honoured to help you on the road to publication success while defusing and removing the stress that the world of AI has caused academic authors of all stripes.

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.