Kyle Matthews, Ph.D.

I help scholars in the humanities and social sciences bring their writing to the standard their ideas deserve without losing the authorial voice that makes the work theirs.

I came to editing through the academy itself. I earned my Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at Brown University: years of writing, and rewriting, in a field I worked in largely through my second language. I know what it is to have an argument clear in your head and watch it lose something on the page, how hard and uncertain it can be to coax it back to life. I know how much a careful, honest reader can help. That is the reader I try to be for every scholar I work with.

Since 2012 I’ve edited dissertations, journal articles, book manuscripts, grant proposals, syllabi, and job-market and tenure materials across history, literature, philosophy, religious and Judaic studies, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science and many more as a freelance copy editor and for Cambridge University Press. I hold professional certificates in proofreading, line editing, copy editing, and developmental editing — and because I write and edit as readily in Spanish as in English, I’m especially at home with the work of scholars writing in English as an additional language.

My approach

Editing is an act of care. I work line by line for clarity of ideas, idiomatic expression, rhythm and intonation, and structure so that your logic carries a reader from your first claim to your last. You will always see what I changed and why, so the manuscript that comes back is one you understand and can defend.

Who I work with

Early-career scholars preparing first books. Graduate students readying a dissertation or a first article. Researchers writing in English as an additional language who want their prose to read as fluently as they think. If you are staring down a deadline and a document that isn’t quite there yet, you are in the right place.