About Me

 

My main trade for the last 45 years has been in the IT industry, holding a number of senior technical positions with large enterprises, both in the public and private sectors and also both as a permanent employee and a self-employed consultant. Even though the majority of the work has been technical, there was also a substantial amount of reviewing and editing of system designs and documentation, which often spanned hundreds of pages and were highly technical in nature. My role for these documents was pretty much as a copy-editor and involved the following skills:

  • Reviewing the technical content and correcting where necessary so that the text was suitable for the intended audience
  • Spotting and correcting typos and spelling errors
  • Spotting and correcting issues relating to grammar and punctuation
  • Correcting instances where the wrong words have been used, e.g. there/their/they're, to/too/two, where/were/wear etc
  • Reviewing sentence construction and correcting badly-worded sentences/paragraphs
  • Recommending changes to ensure the text flowed logically and enhanced readability
  • Reviewing displayed material such as images/captions, tables and lists
  • Reviewing the document(s) for overall layout, formatting and appearance.

I contributed more than 500 hours to the editing tasks described above, so I have considerable experience in copyediting, without having actually worked in a copy-editor role.

While being in full time employment as an IT consultant, I also worked as a freelance author, contributing author and technical editor/reviewer for several major publishers in the USA. These included:

  • Author of two technical books with NewRiders Publishing and QUE Publishing (each around 350 pages)
  • Contributing author of two technical books with QUE Publishing (each around 800-900 pages)
  • Technical editor/reviewer of eight technical books with Macmillan Technical Publishing, NewRiders Publishing, QUE Publishing and Prentice Hall Publishing (some up to 1000 pages).

Please see the author page for details of the books I wrote, the contributing author page for books where I worked as the contributing author and the technical editor page for books where I worked as the technical editor/reviewer.

 

My focus for the last 1–2 years has been to gain the formal qualifications required to be a professional proofreader and editor.

I believe that you never stop learning and I actively pursue a dynamic programme of Contining Professional Development to not only keep up with advances in technology and techniques, but also to expand my capabilities through additional training.

 

John Philcox - January 2025