Frustrated with your revise-and-resubmit? Trying to hit a book or dissertation deadline and lost in a sea of footnotes? No success with grant applications? Hitting the wall with submitting your article to yet another journal and running against the tenure clock?

I can help you with that.

I hold a Ph.D. from NYU in Comparative Literature (2014) and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. I have published in both peer-reviewed journals and major literary nonfiction outlets, which tells you that I know how to get material out where you need it.

To keep up with what academic publishers and reviewers want, I maintain contacts with the major academic presses in the humanities, attend and present at national conferences in my field, and am a member of the key professional organizations in my subfield (Literature).

My favorite projects are those that require developmental and line editing. I find that helping writers identify their stylistic tics in turn identifies points of weakness or potential expansion in their argument.

I can help with most areas of academic writing (or refer you to someone who can), but my strengths lie in the humanities and health policy. I am equipped to handle manuscripts with significant primary or secondary material in French, Old French, Middle English, Arabic, and (to a lesser extent) Spanish, Hebrew, and Latin. I will work in both LaTeX and LyX. 

My client list includes Pulitzer prize-winning authors, White House senior staffers, Ivy League professors specializing in fields from medieval German nunneries to cutting-edge cancer research, and senior scientists in the US government. I am also proud of the legacy T.S. Mendola editing has built of working with early-career female scholars, particularly first generation scholars, through the tenure process. Please contact me for appropriate references for your project; my client list is not public.

Please note: As of Summer 2018 I no longer work on dissertations.  I will work with graduate students on article submissions and chapters in edited volumes, on a case-by-case basis, with approval from your advisor. T.S. Mendola Editing does not provide ghostwriting.

I am currently accepting new clients rarely and on a case-by case basis to work with me personally. However, I have multiple trusted subcontractors that I have trained and trust. Please email to inquire.

Categories of Projects:

• Article submissions, particularly developmental editing for R&R's

• Monographs, particularly tenure books

• Public-facing scholarship ("crossover" books)

• Grant applications (for life-sciences, economics, and humanities)

• Job market materials (for humanities candidates only)

• Book proposals (on a selective basis)

• Indexing (on a selective basis)

• Copyediting and formatting

Why should I hire you?  I can revise my own work for free, or give it to a colleague. Also, you're expensive!

Here's what I typically suggest you do if you are uncomfortable with the expense of hiring an editor: value your own time as a commodity like any other. Set up a time-tracker app on your laptop.  Pick a given project, and any time you sit down to do revisions on that project (any kind of revisions, from checking your grammar to revising your argument) clock yourself. When the project is published, calculate out how many hours you just spent on polishing writing which you could have spent on things you cannot outsource, such as new research,  or teaching, or spending time with your family. Then, calculate out your hourly salary and see how much those revisions just cost you. Academics are socialized not to count the numbers of hours we spend on writing as "work."  Guess what?  It's work.  Value it as such.

As far as revising your own work:  you certainly can go this route, and I highly recommend that you give your work a thorough self-edit before paying someone to go over it. However, we all know that by the end of a long project, one simply becomes blind to one's own stylistic tics and logical fallacies.  There's no shame in hiring a fresh pair of eyes to look through your work! A trusted colleague is another viable option, but remember: they're not incentivized to correct everything they see (I am) nor to tell you frankly what you need to reorganize (I am).  They're invested in protecting their professional relationship with you, as they should be. One does not lend itself to the other.

It is an open secret in the world of academic publishing that there is not enough money or time to hire professionals like me in-house anymore.  Your mentors got this kind of editing automatically once they were under contract with a press.  You will not. 

How are you different from other editors?  Why are you the editor for me?

Editors have different strengths.  Ours is the ability to identify the points of absence or resistance in your argument you did not realize were present, and to suggest potential lines of argument or organization you may not have considered.  Think of my work as the reader reports you wish you had: page-by-page, detailed feedback on how to improve your work. After graduate school, academics often lack a source for this kind of honest, constructive feedback--and judging from the reader reports I read on a weekly basis, peer review isn't making up for it.

That's not a slam against peer reviewers.  A pre-tenure or tenured professor may scrape together, on average, 3-4 hours to do the unpaid labor of reading your work and writing a report.  But they are not working for you.  Their job is first to tell the journal if it should publish your work or not, second to safeguard the discipline from incorrect information, and only third to give you thoughtful, generous feedback (assuming they have the time to do that, which they often don't).  Remember: a tenure dossier gives minimal credit for service to the discipline, and all they have to do is show they've done due diligence--none of which is measured in the improvement of your work. 

Even putting all that aside, you still have to wait an average of 4 months to receive reader reports on your work.  I turn an article around in 2-4 weeks. 

What I don't do:

Unless our fields of study are unusually close, I will not have the deep knowledge of the primary literature that you do. Nor can I correct fundamental gaps in your secondary literature.

Rates:

To work directly with Tara, all rates are $150/hour. Otherwise, we charge $125/hr for regular turnaround and $150/hr and up for rush work (turnaround of less than 2 weeks).  We do provide a flat fee charge for manuscript reviews (less comprehensive than a full developmental edit), based on word count. Please email to inquire.

A sliding-scale rate is available for students and contingent faculty, on a case-by-case basis. I have found that as humanities departments realize the need for junior scholars to have access to the kind of work I do, grant monies are more and more often available to offset the cost of hiring an editor.

Contact

Email me at tsmendolaediting AT gmail DOT com to discuss your project and get a quote. 

T.S. Mendola Editing