Summer Afternoon Editing
"The Summer Landscape" by Vladimir Ammont, 1877
“Summer afternoon—to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
—Henry James, as quoted by Edith Wharton.
My company, Summer Afternoon Editing Co., offers a range of professional editing and writing services.
Editing Services
I am a highly analytical, detail-oriented editor with a combined 30 years of experience in the areas of copyediting, proofreading, writing, and journalism. Past and present editing clients include the University of Iowa Press, Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy, The Nature Conservancy, Associated University Presses, the University Press of Kansas, the Asian Development Bank, the American Society for Aesthetics Graduate E-Journal, and Houghton Mifflin.
If you are a managing editor thinking about adding a copyeditor to your pool of freelancers, please consider me for a trial assignment. I am familiar with the Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press Stylebook, and Financial Times Style. I have grappled with many abstruse editorial dilemmas, and I believe I have generally emerged victorious.
I have a keen eye for all types of errors on the page: grammatical and spelling mistakes, a lack of consistency in style, problems in the logic of the sentence. I have a gift for diagnosing the weak spots of an ailing paragraph.
My wide-ranging general knowledge has saved many authors from embarrassing mistakes. I have relocated the Crimean War from the Mediterranean to its correct site on the Black Sea; detected an incorrect French verb; corrected the spellings of “Lynyrd Skynyrd” and “Isak Dinesen”; corrected the date of the battle of Shiloh.
I am committed to maintaining a high standard. With each manuscript, I am prepared to follow all necessary procedures down to the bitter end, such as matching every single endnote with text and bibliography. I have taken free-form reference lists and put them into the proper format. I have coaxed balky authors into using a wider variety of prepositions.
Most importantly, editorial knowledge needs to be coupled with editorial judgment: a good feel for when to reword and when to let stand, when to query (tactfully, of course) and when to rely on common sense. You can count on me for that.
“I have had the honor of working with Jenny Bennett for the past three years. Her projects are always delivered on time, and she approaches every project with enthusiasm. Ms. Bennett is very detail-oriented, and possesses a thorough knowledge of Chicago Manual of Style. She never has to be corrected, and I have received many compliments from my authors on the precision of her work.”
—Christine Retz, Managing Editor, Associated University Presses
Writing Services
You will find hundreds of examples of my writing in this blog.
For literary analysis, read “The man on the verandah.”
For description of landscape, read “The grave of Louis Leipoldt.”
For analysis of art, read “Desert city of the future.”
For a first-person account of an outdoor experience, read “Blue jeans on Cannon Creek.”
For history, read “Deneys Reitz in WWI: German East Africa.”
For personal memoir, read “Mom and cosmology.”
If you are wondering whether I can write about technical, specialized subjects, I will point to the three management reports I authored during the years I was U.S. Editor of the Financial Times newsletter “International Coal Report.” They were:
Coking Coal: The Outlook for the Future;
PCI and Coke: Market Impacts of Changing Steel Technologies;
US Export Coal in the 1990s: Price, Volume, and Quality.
I gave papers on these subjects at conferences in the US, Canada, Europe, Indonesia, India, and Colombia.
For further information, please contact me at jenny @ summerafternoonediting .net. (You will need to delete the spaces in the address. They have been added to thwart automatic spamming.)
Endless streams and forests 
[…] Financial Times and other news organizations. She currently has a freelance editing business called Summer Afternoon Editing. She received a B.A. in Philosophy at New College in Sarasota, Florida, and an M.A. in Creative […]