John R

John R – Editor

Seasoned, communicative manuscript editor

Overview

Thanks for visiting my Reedsy profile! I’m a seasoned editor of academic and literary writing who’s shaped, queried, polished, corrected, critically evaluated, and enhanced the clarity and elegance of literally thousands of manuscripts—from project proposals and PhD dissertations to journal articles, book chapters, and books. As a generalist editor with curiosity to spare, I’ve edited work from many fields in the natural sciences and virtually every discipline in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. I welcome opportunities to work with scholars, researchers, and graduate students from across the academic spectrum.


My editorial specialties—literary studies, Western philosophy, and Buddhist philosophy—reflect my research background, artistic interests, and university teaching experience. I’ve taught modernist and contemporary poetry, twentieth-century fiction, and literary theory both old and new, and the history of philosophy has played a vital role in my teaching and literary scholarship. Since I’m a lifelong devotee of literature and the arts who’s also familiar with the full sweep of Western philosophy, literary critics, philosophers, linguists, and scholars of religion can feel confident that their manuscript will find an enthusiastic (and comprehending) ear when it lands on my desk. Moreover, a long-standing relationship with the traditions of early Buddhism and Zen/Chan Buddhism makes me a sensitive editor of popular and scholarly writing on Buddhist philosophy and meditation practices.


My editorial services involve careful attention to grammar and style, a commitment to clear and elegant prose, and the elimination of sentence-level errors, whether glaring or subtle. For authors in need of basic editing, I systematically correct errors and establish consistency in the presentation of elements like key terms, hyphenation, case structure, and verb tense. For authors seeking more intensive sentence-level editing, I improve the elegance and cogency of the manuscript’s prose while devoting careful, slow-moving attention to the author’s intent—even when it’s struggling to find the right expression. For manuscripts at early stages of preparation, I offer a wide-angle developmental perspective, providing feedback on logical clarity at the sentence level, argumentation at the paragraph level, and the effectiveness of the manuscript’s overall structure.


A friendly, communicative manuscript editor, I combine a poet’s ear for artful writing with a philosopher’s attention to argumentation and logical clarity—regardless of the author’s academic or artistic discipline.

Services
Non-Fiction
Biographies & Memoirs Buddhism History Music Philosophy Political Science & Current Affairs Sociology
Fiction
Poetry
Languages
English (AUS) English (CAN) English (UK) English (US)

Work experience

Self-employed

Aug, 2009 — Present

Lubbock Meditation, Lubbock, TX

Dec, 2012 — Aug, 2014 (over 1 year)

Lubbock Meditation was a free, grassroots practice group that met every weekend for an hour of seated and walking meditation. It brought together people of diverse backgrounds, ages, and degrees of experience, from raw beginners to longtime meditators. The practice space was provided by Yoga Bean, a yoga studio in Lubbock, Texas, at no charge to our community—and with no strings attached. I founded and served as the organizer of this group in an effort to provide a no-cost opportunity for group meditation in a region where such opportunities are scarce.

English Department, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

Jun, 2007 — Jun, 2009 (about 2 years)

• Developed and taught undergraduate courses in literary theory, poetry and poetics, and twentieth-century literature
• Provided academic advising for current and prospective English majors
• Evaluated and provided ongoing feedback on student writing
• Courses taught: The Art of Memory (contemporary poetry and fiction); Literature and Impermanence (contemporary poetry and fiction); Modernist Poetry: Difficulty and Deceptive Simplicity; Ancient Poetics: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine; Readings in Literary Theory: Metaphor, Allusion, Literariness, Canonicity; Principles of Literary Study: Poetry

Raritan: A Quarterly Review, New Brunswick, NJ

Sep, 2005 — Jul, 2009 (almost 4 years)

• Copyedited and proofread essays, fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction for a prominent literary and humanities journal
• Verified incorporation of manuscript changes into proofs
• Reviewed bluelines
• Created query lists; discussed and resolved queries in editorial meetings
• Extensive use of Chicago Manual of Style guidelines

English Department, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

Sep, 2003 — May, 2007 (over 3 years)

• Developed and taught an introductory poetry course for English majors
• Developed and taught undergraduate courses in composition and research writing
• Coached young writers in the fundamentals of academic writing and critical reading
• Evaluated and provided ongoing feedback on student writing

Undergraduate Writing Center, University of Texas, Austin, TX

Oct, 1999 — Aug, 2000 (10 months)

• Managed student intake and daily operations
• Provided writing tutoring for UT undergraduates
• Responded to the broader public's grammar/writing inquiries via UT’s Writers’ Advice Line
• Copyedited Writing Center publications

English Department, Miami University, Oxford, OH

Aug, 1995 — May, 1997 (over 1 year)

• Developed and taught first-year composition and literature courses
• Coached undergraduates in critical reading, academic writing, and the fundamentals of argumentation
• Evaluated and provided ongoing feedback on student writing

Programs for Academic Support Services, Texas Tech University

Sep, 1992 — Dec, 1994 (about 2 years)

• Provided writing tutoring and grammar instruction for Texas Tech undergraduates

Portfolio

How College Works

Daniel F. Chambliss

A Chronicle of Higher Education “Top 10 Books on Teaching” SelectionWinner of the Virginia and Warren Stone PrizeConstrained by shrinking budgets, can colleges do more to improve the quality of education? And can students get more out of college without paying... read more
Realism in theatre is traditionally defined as a mere seed of modernism, a crude attempt to reproduce an exact copy of reality on stage. Art, Vision & Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama redefines realism as a complex and under-examined form of visual modernism, ... read more
This book provides insights into communication practices that enable efficient work, successful collaboration, and a functional work environment. Maintaining a productive and healthy workplace is predicated on interpersonal communication between people. In org... read more
This book provides an investor-friendly presentation of the premises and applications of the quantitative finance models governing investment in one asset class of publicly traded stocks, specifically real estate investment trusts (REITs). The models provide h... read more
Fireball Lily offers a vivid, firsthand account of Christa-Maria Beardsley's wide-ranging global travels, an endeavor she pursued energetically for a full fifteen years after her retirement from academia. From the Buddhist monasteries of Thailand and Japan and... read more
Not Hitler's Child traces the long, eventful arc of Christa-Maria Beardsley's life - from her childhood in Nazi Germany, where the war forced her family into a life of almost continual displacement, to her immigration to the United States and her two-decade te... read more
Practicing Imperfection

Charles T. Dupree

To know life is to look at it honestly. Practicing Imperfection is a candid exploration of one person's move from being addicted to praise and perfection to becoming more comfortable in his own skin. Through humor and a healthy dose of sarcasm, Practicing Impe... read more
This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century’s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and de... read more
The Postsecular Imagination presents a rich, interdisciplinary study of postsecularism as an affirmational political possibility emerging through the potentials and limits of both secular and religious thought. While secularism and religion can foster inspirat... read more
Kluwick breaks new ground in this book, moving away from Rushdie studies that focus on his status as postcolonial or postmodern, and instead considering the significance of magic realism in his fiction. Rushdie’s magic realism, in fact, lies at the heart of hi... read more
This book gives a new view on the legacy of Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999), one of the central, and yet misunderstood, figures who shaped 20th-century theatre, focusing on his least known last phase of work on ancient songs and the craft of the performer. Salata ... read more
In this book, Daniel K. Miller articulates a new vision of human and animal relationships based on the foundational love ethic within Christianity. Framed around Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, Animal Ethics and Theology thoughtfully examines the shortco... read more
In this volume, Maher contextualizes the work of a group of contemporary analytic philosophers—The Pittsburgh School—whose work is characterized by an interest in the history of philosophy and a commitment to normative functionalism, or the insight that to ide... read more
The year 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Up until recently, the book’s philosophical reception has been shaped, for the most part, by the debates and the climate in philosophy of s... read more
In this wholly original study, Josep Corbi asks how one should relate to a certain kind of human suffering, namely, the harm that people cause one another. Relying upon real life examples of human suffering--including torture, genocide, and warfare--as opposed... read more
Contrastivism can be applied to a variety of problems within philosophy, and as such, it can be coherently seen as a unified movement. This volume brings together state-of-the-art research on the contrastive treatment of philosophical concepts and questions, i... read more
This book considers the activities and writings of early song collectors and proto-ethnomusicologists, memoirists, and other "musical travelers" in 19th-century France. Each of the book’s discrete but interrelated chapters is devoted to a different geographic ... read more
This book addresses the ways in which masculinity is negotiated, constructed, represented, and problematized within operatic music and practice. Although the consideration of masculine ontology and epistemology has pervaded cultural and sociological studies si... read more
Space is a central topic in cultural and narrative theory today, although in most cases theory assumes Newtonian absolute space. However, the idea of a universal homogeneous space is now obsolete. Black holes, multiple dimensions, quantum entanglement, and spa... read more
In this volume, the author offers a substantial reconsideration of same-sex relations in the early modern period, and argues that early modern writers – rather than simply celebrating a classical friendship model based in dyadic exclusivity and a rejection of ... read more
This book reads representations of Western music in literary texts to reveal the ways in which artifacts of imperial culture function within contemporary world literature. Bushnell argues that Western music’s conventions for performance, composition, and liste... read more
Keats and Philosophy

Shahidha Kazi Bari

John Keats remains one of the most familiar and beloved of English poets, but has received surprisingly little critical attention in recent years. This study is a fresh contribution to Keats criticism and Romantic scholarship, positioning Keats as a figure of ... read more
Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of diverse ind... read more
Despite its inherent interdisciplinarity, the Communication discipline has remained an almost entirely anthropocentric enterprise. This book represents early and prominent forays into the subject of human-animal communication from a Communication Studies persp... read more
This unique essay collection considers the impact of New York on the life and works of Wallace Stevens. Stevens lived in New York from 1900 to 1916, working briefly as a journalist, going to law school, laboriously starting up a career as a lawyer, getting eng... read more
“A significant contribution to enhance active learning in the classroom.” - Patrick Blessinger, Executive Director and Chief Research Scientist , Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association With classroom response systems (or CRSs, also known as Student... read more
Gender and Neoliberalism

Elisabeth Armstrong

This book describes the changing landscape of women’s politics for equality and liberation during the rise of neoliberalism in India. Between 1991 and 2006, the doctrine of liberalization guided Indian politics and economic policy. These neoliberal measures va... read more
Racial Reckoning

Renee C. Romano

Few whites who violently resisted the civil rights struggle were charged with crimes in the 1950s and 1960s. But the tide of changed in 1994, and more than one hundred murder cases have been reopened, resulting in over a dozen trials. Yet, as Renee C. Romano s... read more
Uses Buddhist philosophy to discuss diversity as a value, one that can contribute to equity in a globalizing world.Diversity matters. Whether in the context of ecosystems, education, the workplace, or politics, diversity is now recognized as a fact and as some... read more
Retrieving Realism

Professor Hubert Dreyfus

“A picture held us captive,” writes Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, describing the powerful image of mind that underlies the modern epistemological tradition from Descartes onward. Retrieving Realism offers a radical critique of the Cartesian... read more

John has 3 reviews

Professionalism

Quality

Value

Responsiveness

Claire V.

Claire V.

Nov, 2021

I'm working on my first book for self-publication, and I was considering skipping a developmental edit -- but a couple of friends talked me into it, and I'm so delighted with John's work in this edit! He gave me exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for in terms of the organization of the manuscript and the continuity of my work. He also eased some of my anxieties about voice and tone and...
Read more
Garry S.

Garry S.

Aug, 2021

John has done a couple of editing jobs for me now. I'm really happy with his work. He is very reliable and knowledge about what he does. I appreciate the professional relationship we have developed and will continue to use his services in the future.
Garry S.

Garry S.

May, 2021

I'm impressed with the editing John has done for me. He is professional and skilled at what he does. I intend to employ his expertise again in the future and am happy to recommend his services
John R.
Thanks, Garry! I'm glad we're a good fit, and I look forward to working with the rest of your thesis manuscript.

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