Leah Velleman

I'm a freelance editor with a Ph.D. in linguistics and 15 years experience, mostly for the tech industry and academic clients. I offer careful attention to detail, supportive and thoughtful opinions, and familiarity with the requirements of specialist writing. My specialty is making difficult ideas sound easy.

• Copy editing
• Substantive editing
• Information architecture
• Academic editing
• Tech editing
• Mathematical typesetting

Copy editing

A copy editor takes the text you wrote and adds polish. I'll give it a thorough checkup, covering things like correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation, natural and unambiguous phrasing, and, on the web, working links and images.

Substantive editing

I'm an experienced writer myself, and I can share that experience to help you communicate better. Substantive editing can include

• Organizing content that's become convoluted
• Improving the flow of sentences and paragraphs
• Cutting word count to fit a limit
• Rewriting a text for a different audience
• Pointing out where new content could solve problems

Information architecture

Information architecture is the art of making information findable. It's important in print, and absolutely vital on the web, where it's hard to predict how readers will encounter your contact and easy for them to become lost. IA consulting can include

• Helping plan the structure of a new site or subsite
• Moving or reorganizing existing content to improve user experience
• Setting standards for new content

Academic editing

I have a Ph.D. in Linguistics, and my clients have included students and researchers from the social sciences, philosophy, and mathematics. I can help you put your thoughts into the shape that journal editors expect, use technical terms consistently, and use and format the special notations your field requires. (Linguists and mathematicians, among others, may also be interested in TeX and LaTeX services.)

Tech editing

Before going freelance, I worked as an editor and writer in the tech industry. I've worked on API reference, procedural, and conceptual documentation, and done some large-scale information architecture overhauls. And if you have an established docs workflow, I can use your tools, whether you've got a custom XML schema with a proprietary editor or a "docs as code" toolchain with open-source tools.

TeX and LaTeX services

TeX and LaTeX are powerful tools for writing your own equations, tables, syntax trees, and so on. But, like most powerful tools, they make it easy to break things and have lots of options everyday users don't know about. I can take you from "Okay, at least it compiles" to something really professional-looking, with spacing, alignment, and line breaking optimized for readability.

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