Denise M Taylor

It takes courage to dive into foreign waters and seek a professional critique of your writing. However, please be assured that if you ask me to assess or edit your unpublished manuscript or draft document, I will be your contact and undertake the service myself. I do not engage freelance editors to assess or edit my clients’ writing because I […]

Maybe you are reading this article because you’re almost ready to have the final draft of your thesis or academic book/research paper edited, copyedited or proofread. You have put in the hard yards: read, researched, written, reviewed, revised, rewritten and carefully edited, checking that your arguments and research really get you, logically and clearly, from the aims to the conclusions. […]

If you’re ready, or nearly ready, to have your writing (fiction or non-fiction, thesis or academic paper) proofread (or lightly edited), then why not contact me with a brief overview of your project and any specific requests for assistance (such as a looming deadline or the need to stop writing!). I understand that it takes courage to hand over one’s […]

So many writers contact me with assurances that they have self-edited their writing project, maybe many times, and they are ready for it to be proofread. However, on reading a sample I often contact the author and advise that the writing needs to be professionally edited, at least copy edited, before the proofreading stage. This discussion can be tricky! Self-editing […]

I admire successful authors who write organically. These writers depend on waking up most mornings with a new idea to progress their writing project. However, in my experience as a writing mentor and editor, many ‘organic’ writers end up frustrated if ideas dry up overnight or if the huge amount of research/content threatens to overwhelm and destabilise their book project. […]

Whenever I’m reading a novel or editing an unpublished manuscript with heaps of dense descriptive text, it’s always a welcome relief to turn a page and see more white than black, which is usually in the form of dialogue. More importantly, successful dialogue excites most readers because it not only advances the story and fleshes out the characters, but enlivens the […]

Letters written by British suffragettes imprisoned in London’s Holloway Prison in the early twentieth century, and the Holloway brooch awarded to these women for their bravery on their release, send shivers down my spine. The Holloway brooch succinctly symbolises the militant struggle of the suffragettes as they fought tirelessly for the right of women to vote in political elections. Designed […]

I often stand and commune with Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting, ‘Weeping Woman’. It conveys extreme sadness, much of what is experienced by humans, near and far, today. I run my eye over it, wondering whether there’s something that I may have missed since I last stood before it. I go early, alone, with an art buddy, or with a few […]

A few years ago I wrote a thesis with its focus the mid-nineteenth-century painting by British artist Valentine Prinsep, ‘The flight of Jane Shore’. I researched Jane Shore’s life to the point of obsession and got to know this medieval royal mistress so well that I thought I could speak for her—write her story in the genre of historical fiction. […]

This is my second article about words that have been used in the wrong context by writers whose manuscripts I have assessed, edited or proofread. Was it a historic or historical event? Was it a continual or continuous noise? Is someone illusive or elusive? The confusion can occur because these words are spelt similarly or sound similar, or both, so it’s understandable […]