We edit your document to ensure that the spelling, punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, and overall style reach the standard expected of an expert native English speaker (British or American, according to your requirements). We use several reference sources to ensure that the spelling and punctuation conform to a universally accepted standard and that all technical terms are used correctly: New Oxford English Dictionary, New Oxford American Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary, Stedmans Medical Dictionary, the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the Oxford World Encyclopedia. In rare situations where our editors are unfamiliar with a technical term that also does not appear in any of our reference sources, they will search the Internet to check that the usage is correct. If this last, less reliable check does not yield a clear result, the editors will suggest that you check the usage yourself.

Editing time

We usually spend approximately the same amount of time editing each document (on a per-word basis). In cases where somewhat fewer corrections to the language usage are required, we spend more time analyzing potential areas of ambiguity in the presentation of the scientific content, and thereby reduce the possibility of such problems arising during peer review. If the overall editing time is then still lower than expected for a particular job, we reduce the amount of the invoice on a pro rata basis. We guarantee that you will never be overcharged, meaning that if we do spend less time than usual on a job that you send us, the final price will always be reduced accordingly.

Certification letter

We can provide you with a letter providing certification that your document has been edited by a native English speaker. Some journal editors now ask authors to supply this type of certification when they are submitting a manuscript for publication. Please note that we can only supply you with such a certificate if we have edited the entire manuscript.

Examples of our work

We use the standard track-changes facility in Microsoft Word so that you can clearly see the changes we have made. We also add comprehensive endnotes for explaining our editing and also asking you to check any areas of ambiguity. One aim of our endnotes is to help you when drafting future documents. Both the tracked changes and endnotes can be viewed in various ways depending on the version of Microsoft Word you use and the options selected. The examples below show one way of displaying the changes for a particular text extract (the topic relates to mechanical friction).