You’ve done the hard work; now, let me help it shine! Whether it’s helping clean up flow or catching honest errors, I want to work with you to polish up your project so it can be the best it can be. But why should you pick me over other editors? Although my professional background is in journalism, my double major in English and Philosophy left me well suited to various fields and genres. English deepened my love and appreciation for the literary and well written, while Philosophy imparted a robust (if, to many, surprising) interest in well-articulated concepts and rigorous critical thinking. I also have a mind for both the creative and the technical: On the one hand, I pride myself on finding good turns of phrase, enjoy creative problem solving, and always love a good story; on the other hand, I aim for precision and concision and understand science, statistics, and so on better than many. I also don’t just edit “by ear”—that is, editing based only on how grammar sounds. (It...
Among my favorite, most beloved words, there’s one I hardly use: myriad. I distinctly recall a course instructor telling us that “a myriad of” or “myriads” is wrong; the word is an adjective, after all, and should be used like one! However, years later, I know that’s not the case. But she isn’t alone in this error, or her judgment of it. As Merriam-Webster explains (italics, theirs; bolding, my own): “Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase a myriad of , seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective. As the entries here show, however, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton (plural myriads ) and Thoreau ( a myriad of ), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English. There is no reason to avoid it.” It seems that, oftentimes with linguistic prescriptivism, the prescri...