Carolyn Lengel – Editor

I served as an in-house development editor at Bedford/St. Martin's (later Macmillan Learning), one of the top five college publishers, for thirteen years, and as a freelance writer and editor for other major publishers for several years before that. In the development editor role, I worked with authors from the initial planning stages of a book or media project through the final publication. I guided authors toward choices that would allow the published product to meet market needs and win customers' hearts. I edited drafts and suggested revisions until the right book emerged from the manuscript, and when that book eventually ended up in teachers' and students' hands, it was likely to have my marketing copy on the back cover.

Although big-picture thinking is part of my expertise, details are extremely important to me. My work requires intimate familiarity with guidelines of three major documentation styles (MLA, APA, and CMOS). If you're a researcher, I can help you show off all your hard work in error-free notes and references. If the grammar and style choices absolutely, positively have to be perfect, I know how to make them so--and I know that "perfect" means different things to different people, so I can help you determine which kind of perfect your work needs to be.

And educational publishing isn't the only world I know; I have served as an independent editorial contractor working across a range of fiction and nonfiction genres. Self-help books? I can help. Comics that need more zip, pow, oomph? Done, done, and done. True tales of Bollywood? I'll make them dance and sing.