Welcome! I'm Julie Coleman, and I'm based in the Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, metro area. For ten years I have worked as a professional copy editor and have edited more than thirty published books.

My latest position was as a Senior Editor at Publications International, Ltd., and I now offer freelance editing services full-time.

With my experience and skills, we can work together to make sure your manuscript is exactly the way publishers need it to be.

My resume

Editing and Proofreading Service Levels

• Basic Copyediting/Proofreading
  Review manuscripts for spelling and typographical errors, grammar, punctuation, and consistency.
  
  Basic copyediting does not include checks for content organization, sentence structure, clarity, word choice, or style. Should an author need these services, a thorough edit is suggested.

• Thorough Editing
  Basic copyediting (checking for spelling and typographical errors, grammatical errors, punctuation, and consistency), as well as looking for problems in tone, flow, dialogue, word choice, tense, point-of-view, sentence structure, and clarity.
  
  A thorough edit may also include suggestions for restructuring the manuscript to ensure proper transitions, presentation, and organization of the content. 

• Final Manuscript Reviews
  After basic or thorough editing changes have been suggested by an editor and then incorporated by the author, a final manuscript review is often needed. This final pre-publishing step is intended to ensure that the author incorporated the editor's suggestions correctly and that any amended work has a final proofing.
  

Editing Styles

Each publishing house has its own style guide, and I can adapt to whatever style guidelines your organization uses.

• AP Style
  Most newspapers base their styles upon the Associated Press style.
  
  
• Chicago Manual of Style
  The most widely used style guide.
  
  
• Words Into Type
  A clearer and more precise version of the Chicago style.

Proofreading example:

While Google lists 879,000 entries for the word pair "copy editing" and 502,000 entries for the single word "copyediting," only one choice is correct: "copyediting."  "Copy editor," however, is two words...so a copy editor does the job of copyediting. Proofreading, however, has a different rule--it is always one word. Thus, the sentence "A proof reader does proof reading" is incorrect, and I would change it to "A proofreader does proofreading." So why do the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook agree that a "proof reader" who does "proof reading" is incorrect, while a "copy editor" who does "copyediting" is correct? Unfortunately, the answer has been lost to the sands of time, but the main thing you need to know is that there is a correct answer, and I will always make sure that your letter, report, or manuscript is correct, as well.

If you live in the Minneapolis/St Paul, Minnesota area and need freelance editing services of any kind, feel free to give me a call at 651-236-0533 or drop me an e-mail at mail@juliecoleman.com, and we'll talk about your editing needs!