Dr. Mika Turim-Nygren

Line Editing

I offer sentence-by-sentence recommendations on how to improve your writing’s legibility and comprehensibility. Using “track changes” in Microsoft Word or “suggesting mode” in Google Docs, I propose a series of potential edits, which you are then free to review one-by-one, accepting those that serve your purposes and rejecting those that do not.

Clients often say this kind of focused, detailed feedback helps them think seriously about what exactly they are trying to convey, and how they might do so as effectively as possible.

Second-Language Editing

For non-native speakers of English, I offer detailed recommendations on how to make your writing sound as fluent as possible. In addition to keeping a close eye on common second-language challenges (e.g. articles, prepositions, possessives, verb conjugations), we’ll make sure to address idiomatic phrasing and appropriate terminology.

This kind of personalized attention not only helps clients improve the piece of writing in question, but also improves their overall confidence when expressing themselves in English.

Weekly Check-Ins

I offer regularly-scheduled phone conversations to discuss your progress toward your accountability goals. After each conversation, I will follow up with a set of notes outlining what we discussed, as well as reminding you about next steps. Meetings can be scheduled weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, or ad hoc, depending on your needs and availability.

These regular check-ins serve to boost confidence, clarify ideas, and alleviate self-doubt, especially when trying to make steady, incremental progress on long-term writing projects.

Brainstorming Sessions

As an interested listener, I offer a supportive space for working through initial ideas and aspirations. Using a variety of evidence-based brainstorming techniques (saybacks, mock interview questions, idea mapping, audience visualization, genre analysis), we will come up with a list of concrete action items to get your next project off the ground.

The purpose of these sessions is to help clients realize how much they actually have to say about the subject already, instilling a sense of optimism and excitement about the project ahead.

Referee Report Feedback

Submitted a grant or paper, and now have a referee report in hand? I can help you incorporate this feedback in a way that makes it much more likely that your work will get accepted in the future. Constructive criticism can be hard to take, but just remember, “revise and resubmit” is actually great news! Even rejection letters offer us tremendous opportunities to improve. To help keep you moving forward, I’ll synthesize your referee reports into a straightforward list of tips that you can apply directly to your paper.

The objective of summarizing referee reports in this way is to help clients “get outside their own head” and focus on making improvements, rather than getting bogged down in self-doubt.

Model Paper Outline

Looking to publish, and already have a journal, periodical, or website in mind? Send me an article that showcases the kind of writing that publication tends to feature, and I’ll produce a reverse outline that you can use to help put your paper together, including detailed tips on genre, structure, organization, rhetoric, and citations.

This kind of outline helps take the guesswork out of writing by giving clients a clear set of guidelines to follow, enabling them to better meet publishers’ expectations.