Dissertation Technical Review and Other Editing Services

Editing and Production Services

Ru Temple Design Studio consists of Ruth Temple and associates, offering editing and pre-print production services, and drawing on my 25 years of professional experience in the work and craft of getting words into print.

Dissertation Technical Review

Since 2001, one of my primary sources of clients has been as one of a pool of editors approved to perform Technical Review Editing for dissertation students at the California Institute of Integral Studies, http://ciis.edu , a graduate school in San Francisco. A Technical Review edit consists of checking for internal consistency, citation/reference agreement, and formatting consistency to both the school requirements and the department's chosen style manual. The different departments of CIIS currently make use of the APA Publication Manual 5th Edition, the Chicago Manual of Style 15th Edition, and MLA. In addition to the basic format checks above, I also flag problematic grammar and typos.

Upon completion of a Technical Review, the student is given a detailed feedback document, with corrections and commentary, so that the corrective edits are in the author's own hand, and that any questions may be resolved in dialog.

Copyediting

Formatting and preparing a book-length manuscript requires attention to an inordinate amount of details.
With the advent of digital typesetting, more commonly tossed off as advanced word processing, an author is expected not just to get their ideas formulated, organized and distilled down to paper, but also to pour that writing into what is easily the fussiest formatting most people will ever have to deal with in their lives. For love and mere money, one can hire this part to be done, and that has formed the core of my livelihood for over 25 years, from graphic design and desktop publishing to manuscript copyediting and technical editing.

Copyediting services are offered, and may include some or all of the following:

Spell-checking, both automated and proofreading

Braiding several shorter files into one complete document for ease in editing, global searching, and applying formatting consistency tools

Formatting front matter standard pages to a school required format

Applying proper pagination (front matter i, ii, iii, ... and chapter 1, 2, 3, ...)

Creating and applying stylesheet formats for consistent titling across the entire manuscript

Generating and Inserting Table of Contents, List of Tables, and List of Figures, from formatted styles using Word's automation tools

Applying proper format to Reference entries

Preparing graphics for publication

Formatting tables and table titles

Individualized Tutoring and Workshop Classes

Beyond all other forms of editing and publication production I have done in my working life, dissertation technical editing support continues to surprise and delight me with how emotionally engaging it is. I see this work as a sacred practice similar to midwifery.

People who come to the dissertation process generally do just one project this size in a lifetime, and as with any complex project one approaches for the first --and likely only--time, there is a formidable learning curve. In addition, this is perhaps the fussiest set of formatting requirements to any published work extant. To help ease this process, I offer both individualized tutoring in the formatting process, and in 2005 have developed and taught several sessions of a workshop in Advanced Practice in Word for CIIS Dissertation Students.

My future plans include distilling my class lessons into an online version of the workshop, and to make that web-class available to the general writing public in the coming year.