Writing and Editing Services

Welcome! Thank you for your interest in booking a writing or editing service with me, Whitney Sweet, TROU’s editor and creator.

What I promise for editing:

  1. I promise to be kind with my critiques. I’m a writer too, I get how it feels to hand over your masterpiece to someone.
  2. I promise a thorough job. I will go over your work with a fine tooth comb. I will point out tiny errors, like missing commas, and larger places in need of improvement, such as a plot hole you might need to work on. I’ll also highlight what’s working, what’s funny, and what I just plain old enjoy about your work.
  3. I promise professionalism. I will take the utmost care of your work, and get it back to you as soon as possible. I will always provide you with a time frame, and keep in touch with you if you have any questions or concerns. I’m just an email away.
  4. Your work is yours. You won’t see any ideas taken from your work appearing elsewhere in my work or beyond!

What I promise for writing projects:

  1. A specially written piece, just for you. If you want a poem, short story, or something more, I am happy to work with you until you are satisfied. Want to write down your life story? I’m happy to help with that too.
  2. Discretion is my middle name. Is this project a surprise? I won’t let the chickens out of the barn, if you catch my drift.
  3. Work done in a timely manner. I will give you a timeline for the projected finish of your project. If that changes, you’ll be the first to know.

Pricing: Lastly and most importantly, pricing. Since we are all budget conscious, I aim to work with you to find an agreed upon price for your project that fits your budget. You won’t get a 40 chapter novel for $5, but I will try to be reasonable with what I charge, if you are equally reasonable with what you’re asking for. I hope we can strike an accord!

How it works: Email me with your request for either an editing or writing project to assistantsweet@gmail.com (this is my business email). I will get back to you and we can negotiate the price and terms of the agreement. Your payment can be made through a custom PayPal button, created just for you. PayPal also accepts credit cards. I’m still figuring out the whole PayPal thing, so I hope you’ll be patient with me!

I am so excited to offer these services and I hope to hear from lots of you. Sharing my craft is my passion. I hope you’ll want to share your passion with me too.

About Me: Whitney Sweet holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and English as well as an Master of Arts in Communication and Culture from York University in Toronto. She is an award winning, published writer, with experience critiquing everything from poetry, to short stories, to essays. She promises you a professional and timely service to help give you a second opinion on your work. She also promises you honesty delivered with kindness.

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Whitney, looking for inspiration.

As always, Whitney strives to only ever look at the writing, never the person who wrote it. It is her mission to provide positive, constructive feedback for you so you can improve upon your creative writing. As a writer, she knows how hard it is to share work with strangers through the internet. That is how she is able to understand where you are coming from, and is able to help you with the creative solutions you can use to move forward with you storytelling in a positive direction.

Her services include:

  • Critique of your work, illuminating all positive aspects of the writing, as well as areas for possible improvement.
  • Basic editing for grammar and spelling errors.
  • Help with story direction if you’re stuck.
  • Personalized attention to lining and form of you poems.
  • Help with clarifying your ideas, story, or poem.
  • Attention to the voice, organization, story or poem structure, and sentence or line structure.
  • Whitney offers annotated notes, using Word’s Tracker Changes to give you a comprehensive list of areas of improvement. This gives you a highlighted list in the margins of your work so you can see each spot that needs attention, not just a summary at the end.
  • Working with you on any questions or concerns you might have regarding your writing.

Her services do no include:

  • Major rewrites. This is your work, and you should be in charge of the changes you decide to make. Whitney might make a suggestion of how a sentence might flow better, but the choice to rewrite it is up to you.

Format for critiques: All pieces being submitted for critique must be in Word doc.x format to allow for tracking of comments. Prose should be double spaced. Poetry can be in any line formation.

Whitney will critique any genre of writing, though she will admit horror is not her favourite.

***Please note: 

Having your work critiqued by Whitney Sweet does not guarantee publication in T.R.O.U. Lit. Mag. You are, of course, welcome to submit any piece, however, it will be subject to the same scrutiny for publication that all other submissions must pass before they appear in the magazine. 

What people are saying about their critiques:

 Any experienced writer can tell you that editing and revising one’s own work is even more difficult than the original writing process. As writers, we live inside our heads with a piece of work for so long that it becomes too familiar, too much a part of us for us to critique it objectively and revise accordingly. That’s why sharing our writing with others for their responses and input is so important. It’s why writers go on expensive writing workshop retreats.
            I recently asked Whitney Sweet at TROU Magazine to critique a short story that I am working on. She obviously read the material very closely and pointed out problems that had eluded my attention, including a timeline problem that I hadn’t noticed and more than one place where my language can be tightened up and/or toned down. She has a good feel for excess verbiage and how to prune it. Her remarks — even the few that I don’t particularly agree with! — stem from a careful, attentive, sensitive reading and are clearly articulated with specific suggestions for improving the text. I am certain that integrating some of Whitney’s suggestions will indeed improve the story. I’m eager to get to work on it.
 
            In short, Ms. Sweet offers a valuable critiquing service to us writers at an extremely reasonable cost. I’m sure this is not the last time I will ask her to critique a work in progress for me.
-Hank Trout

I thought it was really useful.

A great combination of the small and practical (pointing out awkward sentences) and bigger ideas, like breaking the piece into two. Whitney was able to provide much food for thought for a very modest price. I like this kind of critique – a nudge here, a question there – rather than something more heavy handed or prescriptive.

 – Mary Fairhurst Breen