John R – Editor

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.