SUBSTANTIVE EDITING
PROOFREADING
BIBLIOGRAPHY
& CITATION STYLING
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PROFESSIONAL
WRITING
SERVICES
About Two Lands
Natalie Ritchie
Editing at Two Lands is provided by Natalie Ritchie, a professional editor and Egyptology postgraduate. Natalie holds an MA in Egyptology from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She participated in the 2011 field season at the Old Kingdom family cemetery at Tehna, near Minya. Working since 2018 as a general-purpose and academic editor with global editing house Scribendi (a company that accepts only one in one thousand applicants onto its editing roster), she is fully versed in US/Can/UK/AU English spelling, punctuation and language usage conventions, and edits to a broad range of in-house and stand-alone style guides. She edits in English and reads French and German. Her career spans writing and publicity in the tourism industry, including time as a travel writer (she is a former Frommer’s Australia co-author) and four years as features editor of Australia’s highest-circulation parenting publication. She is the author of a book on feminism.
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A member of Macquarie University’s Rundle Foundation for Egyptian Archaeology, she lives near Brisbane, Australia.
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And the Two Lands? ‘Two Lands’ was the ancient Egyptian designation for Egypt itself. It derives from the unification of the northern and southern parts of the country that launched what we know today as the classical civilization of ancient Egypt.
Why Employ an Editor?
Even if you are a native speaker of English, typographical errors, contradictions, underdeveloped arguments, verbosity, redundancies and obscurity of meaning can all creep into your drafts. An editor will catch all these issues of logic, clarity, diction and organization. Have you buried a groundbreaking insight at the end of paragraph 23? An editor will give it the prominence it deserves, embedded thoughtfully in the Introduction or opening paragraphs. Do you have themed material spread out disjointedly over four sections in your journal article? An editor will help you group them into one. Thanks to the editor’s sharp eye and sound familiarity with various grammatical rules (Which is right—‘which’ or ‘that’? Should I use an en dash or a hyphen?), they will quickly ensure correct grammar, spelling and punctuation. One of the surest ways to detract from an otherwise excellent document is to leave it peppered with inconsistencies; an editor will elide these instances, making uniform such things as capitalization, numerals, terminology and proper names. Hanging or erroneous cross-references will be resolved, leading readers to the right destination every time. Formatting will also come under the editor’s lens—no more sudden font switches or mismatching heading hierarchies. Last but not least, an editor will whip your citations and bibliography into alignment with your chosen reference style. The end result is a document that is as clean and compelling as can be.
​If your native language is not English, editing’s value comes to the fore. A well-crafted article or book in today’s lingua franca, English, makes your work accessible to the widest possible audience. Inadvertent errors in syntax, tense or idiomatic expressions can easily mar the impact of even the most competent scholarly work. Many Egyptologists can read several languages, but writing in a non-native language is much more challenging. An editor can dispel any ambiguities and eliminate any outright missteps of expression, leaving you with a clear document fit to serve as your version of record.
Get in touch
Over the phone, in person, or online
Brisbane, Australia
