Rosemary Mulray

Policies

Read about Rosemary’s policies

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Student editing policy

The standard for editing student work is laid out by the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd), available here, and it is referenced by the professional editing policies of most universities. Every editor of student work should follow it; if you have contacted an editor and they don’t know about this policy, that’s a sign that they are inexperienced, unprofessional or even practise unethically.

The IPEd policy dictates that an editor of student work should never perform editing tasks that are considered substantive. Essentially, this means that an editor can only correct the work, not improve it, per se. For more information about the different levels of editing is coming soon. Editors may identify more substantive issues they see in the document by leaving comments (e.g. identifying flaws in the logic of an argument, suggesting a passage be rewritten for clarity or identifying passages that could be deleted for brevity), but these must be addressed by the author and not be fixed for them.

Perhaps most importantly, you must go through every single change your editor makes (including formatting changes) and accept or reject them mindfully. Only then can the work be truly considered your own. This is a time-consuming task, so please factor this in to your timeline for submitting. How long this takes is difficult for me to tell as an editor, as this is a post-editing task; however, I have seen that this can take a week or more.

Sample edits

Sample edits are a good way of seeing if my approach is a good fit for your document, but they do take time. Therefore, if you would like a sample, I can provide one for a fee of $50 per 1000 words, which would be subtracted from the final fee if we were to go ahead with the edit.

The bigger the sample, the more context I will have, and the better the edit will represent my approach.

Privacy policy

I consider all the documents I edit or proofread to be confidential. They are not shared or published in any way; I do not add them to a public portfolio, save any metadata nor use them in any advertising or marketing material. If I do happen to use images of a document, like the ones on this website, I blur the text enough for it to be illegible.

If I do want to use extracts of your work by way of demonstration (e.g. in a presentation), I will ask for your explicit permission to do so in writing.

I save three different versions of your drafts in case of catastrophic software or hardware failure (on my end or yours). There are versions on two different hard drives and one in cloud storage. These are all password protected, and the cloud drive (Proton Drive) is encrypted. Only I have access to them.

If the final edited document is too large to send to you by a compressed folder email attachment, we may need to use a cloud drive to transfer the files. I have accounts for both Dropbox and Google Drive if they are convenient for you, but I prefer Proton because of its much more robust privacy policy and end-to-end encryption. I believe Proton Drive is free to use, so I encourage you to investigate it.

If you would like me to sign a non-disclosure agreement, I would be happy to do so.

A note about private Microsoft Word documents

I occasionally come across ‘protected’ or ‘sensitive’ documents, which means that different types of editing are restricted. These documents can be labelled ‘confidential’, ‘restricted’ or ‘internal use’. To make any edits in these documents, I have to strip all the document properties, which may or may not be important to you. If they are important, there are two options: you can (a) give permissions to my Microsoft account as a user, or (b) remove the restrictions altogether. If you know that your document is protected this way and the document properties are important to you, please let me know in advance so we can make these changes efficiently.

Cancellations, delays and rescheduling

When we decide to make a booking, I ask for a 10% deposit. Once this deposit is paid, the booking is secured and considered final.

Needing to reschedule a booking is sometimes necessary, but because booking times are often in increments of weeks and months, changing the booking close to the start time means that I usually cannot fill that time with other work, which can make it a major loss of business. If the booking is cancelled, delayed by more than 30 days or rescheduled within a week of the booking time, the deposit will be forfeit and a new deposit must be made before any work can begin.

This may feel harsh, but you can compare it to a doctor’s appointment or a restaurant booking. They often require that you pay a portion or all of the fee when your booking is cancelled within a certain amount of time; that cancellation is a loss of business that otherwise cannot be filled or is very difficult to fill.

If your document is submitted late, the return date will be delayed by the same amount of time. If there is another booking scheduled directly after yours, that subsequent booking takes priority. The delayed time added on to your edit will commence after that subsequent booking is finished. So, it can be quite important to your timeline that you get your document to me at the agreed time.

These policies are designed to try and protect my small business from major losses if circumstances change suddenly, or worse, an unreliable author promises one thing but does another. This is rare, but it does happen, so being clear about what your obligations are as an author is important to avoid disaster scenarios.

Post-edit changes and follow-up questions

Having questions about the choices I make during the edit or wanting to discuss it is completely reasonable. However, it can take a long time to answer these questions or have these discussions, so I have created a policy that details a compromise.

As the author, you are entitled to a fixed number (numbered in the agreement document that we both sign) of complementary ‘actions’, which are tasks such as replying to emails, formatting changes, video calls and phone calls. After those actions are exhausted, additional actions will attract a fee, which is determined by me (usually based on time in increments of hours).

If you have issues with formatting in Word, it can be worth your while to look up tutorials about how to fix your issue without having to use up your complementary actions. There is a vast bounty of tutorials out there, and more than likely, someone has asked a question in a forum that can fix your problem. I recommend the Word Tips website run by Alan Mandell (https://word.tips.net/index.html) for quality advice. In particular, learning a bit about the Styles function in Word can do wonders, and it’s a powerful tool that can make your life in Word easier.

Of course, being human, I can make mistakes. If you identify a mistake that you cannot easily fix, I will happily make that change for you without taking up any of your complementary actions.

If you change your mind about a choice and would like help implementing it, I can offer to help but am not obliged to do so.

Questions?

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