Editng
Samantha offers three types of editing for drafted projects: substantive editing to clarify and reorganize a manuscript to ensure that the content, structure and language are suitable for its intended purpose and readership, stylistic editing to clarify meaning, eliminate jargon and clichés, smooth language and transitions between sentences and paragraphs, and copy editing to standardize grammar, spelling, punctuation and other mechanics of style.
Testimonial
“After a year of writing my first fiction novel, I was ready for someone with editing skills to give it an objective assessment. I contacted the English Department at James Madison University for recommendations. JMU put the word out and I got several emails from interested editors. I chose Samantha Thornhill. She offered to edit the first ten pages of my novel to give me a sample of how she would edit. This sample seemed very thorough, so I hired her to edit my novel.
She had the novel for three months before we had a meeting to go over the full edit. She had thoroughly covered each line of each chapter and had an overview of how all the parts fit the whole. She knew my characters as well as I did and offered insightful suggestions for fleshing them out further. It was hard not to agree with her suggestions as they would usually lead to greater clarity of character actions and plot progression.
I knew I needed much more than grammatical corrections. The psychology of character and the sequencing and pacing of plot were major concerns. Sometimes a writer is too close to the story and forgets that the reader doesn’t know what the writer imagines until it is written down. Samantha was that reader, who pointed out to me the places where the reader needs more information to be fully ‘in the story’. As a result of Samantha’s skill in analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of my natural writing tendencies, I will be now be better able to evaluate many aspects of my writing as I am writing. I would highly recommend Samantha Thornhill as an editor.”
-Mary Ellen Jantzi, Virginia, USA