Quality you can trust

If you’re looking for a bona fide logophile to scrutinise your written content and panel beat it to perfection, you’ve come to the right place. If you Googled “logophile”, you’ve definitely come to the right place!

We get it. Not everyone has the time, energy or desire or to pore over their writing before they hit “send”, deliver a presentation, submit a dissertation or publish a journal article. But we do, and we enjoy it! So, leave it to us. You can trust our team of professional editors and proofreaders to deliver a quality product that’s polished, refined, and guarantees an easy reading experience.

With 10 years of experience in the language services sector and many more before we started the company, an impeccable track record of happy clients from around the world, and a reputation for excellence second to none, we are masters of our craft.

The “four Cs” of our editing and proofreading services

At The Savvy Linguist, we insist on high standards and strive for perfection in every job. These standards ensure that all projects, regardless of size, receive the same scrutiny and eagle-eyed attention to detail, and all our clients receive the same level of service and attention from our team.

To consistently deliver work of exceptional quality, we adhere to a model we’ve developed in-house, which we call “the four Cs”:

• Clarity means that the edited product is accurate, clear, and easy to read and understand
• Correctness means we guarantee work that is free of errors. This includes spelling, grammar and punctuation. For editing jobs, this even includes fact checking, fixing figures if these are calculated incorrectly, and changing date or number formats.
• Conciseness, so the reader doesn’t get bogged down by detail, lost in a sea of wordy run-on-sentences, or overwhelmed by complex language when simple language will do.
• Consistency: we only assign one editor or proofreader to each project, so the language you use is guaranteed to be consistent from start to finish.

Editing vs Proofreading

While editing and proofreading belong to the same family of language services, there are differences between the two.

Proofreading focuses on identifying and correcting errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation and typography. It’s generally the final step in the document review process, before content gets published, distributed or sent to print.

Because this text has usually already been reviewed and edited before being sent to a proofreader, it involves a lighter touch.

Editing goes a step further than proofreading to improve the overall clarity, flow and style of your writing. This includes sentence structure and your choice of words.

Editing is further broken down into different subtypes:

• Copy editing services involve refining the text for grammar, style and consistency.
• Substantive editing or content editing services are a good choice when you require a heavier edit to address the structure and organisation of your content and improve the overall message of your text.
• Academic editing services are specific to academic papers, dissertations and theses. These are specialised texts that must meet precise requirements relating to academic writing and publishing to be published. Common examples include the Harvard, Oxford, APA and Chicago referencing styles. Our proofreaders and editors are comfortable working with standard referencing styles, as well as with specific style guides for smaller journals and publications. On request, we offer reference checking as an add-on to our academic editing service.

Types of content we work with

When it comes to written content, we don’t discriminate. We work with a range of written content, so you can relax and leave it to the experts.

Some examples of the editing and proofreading projects we’ve worked on in the past include:

• essay editing and proofreading
• academic proofreading and editing, including Honours, Master’s, PhD, MBA and postdoctoral studies theses and dissertations
• editing and proofreading of textbooks, journal articles and entire journals for major publishing companies, notably three pan-African law journals, one pan-African tax journal and one pan-African governance journal
• editing of marketing materials and presentations
• website editing
• editing of technical and scientific papers
• editing of research proposals
• editing of annual and quarterly reports for corporates, international organisations and NGOs, and
• editing and proofreading of books – both fiction and non-fiction.

Pricing and Process

We will always quote you per source word, for maximum transparency. We’ll also give you an estimated turnaround time based on the word count and the level of complexity of the project. This way, you know upfront exactly what a job will cost you and you can budget accordingly. In the unlikely event we run into delays, we will communicate with you immediately. No hidden costs. No mixed messages or unkept promises. Total transparency.

We also follow a rigorous quality control process for all written content. We use the Track Changes function in Word, Google Docs and PowerPoint so you can see exactly what we’ve changed and what fixes we’ve suggested and why, allowing you to maintain control over your product at every step of the process.

Every job comes standard with two reverts. If you are not satisfied after two rounds of review or would like to make changes to the text after the review phase, we will charge you for additional work. Again, the fee will be communicated with you upfront.