Improving Your Manuscript to
Meet Your Objectives
Let Carmichael Editing strengthen your message through developmental editing, refine your language flow through line editing, and ensure language consistency and accuracy through copy editing.
“Virginia Carmichael was one of the first persons to read my manuscript. She returned a document thoroughly scarred by the application of her intelligence, her substantive knowledge, and her severe editorial pencil. In responding to her numerous comments and suggestions, I found myself approaching a clarity that I had previously been successful in avoiding. In subsequent tampering with these essays, I can only hope that I have not undone too much of what she helped me realize.” – William Simon, Author
Projects
Carmichael Editing clients include academics and graduate students, writers, and staff at non-profit organizations and businesses. She works with academic and literary manuscripts, dissertations, memoirs, newsletters, sermons, and talks at all stages of development along the way to oral presentations or formal or informal publication.
Able to comply with any style requirements, Carmichael Editing relies primarily on The Associated Press Stylebook, MLA Handbook, and The Chicago Manual of Style 18.
Approach
I edit to strengthen the organization, fluidity, and strength of your message. This can sometimes be disconcerting to a writer, but those who go through the process with me find that our work results in a manuscript they feel good about, are proud of. I begin with respect for your work and for you as the writer. You remain in charge of all editing decisions. The objective is for me, as a third party with a fresh, trained, and informed perspective, to act as an ideal reader of your work and suggest ways to fine-tune it for publication or distribution.
About Virginia Carmichael
With professional training in literature and writing, Carmichael has been consistently responsible for both writing and editing in her work experience of more than 30 years. She wrote Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War (1993) and co-authored a second book with British environmental geographer Robin Doughty, The Albatross and the Fish: Linked Lives in the High Seas (2011).
Carmichael taught literature and writing at the University of Montana, served as a senior managing auditor, with report writing and editing responsibility, at the Texas State Auditor's Office, and provided writing and editing services at a Massachusetts law firm. She also created and edited the content for Falmouth MA Community Preservation Fund website. Along the way, she has enjoyed editing the writing of colleagues at their request.
Carmichael’s passion for reading and her knowledge about a variety of topics–from history, religion, and philosophy to economics and political science–deepen her capacity for strengthening a wide variety of manuscripts through all editing stages.
Carmichael holds a PhD in Literature from Rice University and a Master of Public Affairs from the LBJ School of Public Affairs. She is proficient in Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat.
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