Geraldine has an impressive qualification and career record which enables her to review, with understanding,  a wide range of both academic and commercial documents.

Her formal qualifications are:
• BA (English, Psychology, Statistics) (University of South Africa)
• BSc Hons (Statistics) (University of South Africa)
• HDip Tax Law (University of the Witwatersrand)
• PGCE (University of Johannesburg)
• Unit Standard # 117871 - Facilitate Learning using a variety of given methodologies
• Unit Standard # 15218 - Analysis and Assessment

Geraldine has been reviewing PHD and Masters theses for four years in a variety of faculties including Humanities, Business Science, Chemistry and Life Sciences, Public Health, Physics and Education. In no particular order these theses have been submitted for qualifications at the University of Grenoble (France), GIBS (The University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Johannesburg, the University of Namibia, the University of Limpopo and the University of Stellenbosch.
Geraldine also has commercial editing experience for corporates and trusts.

Her working career has spanned a number of different environments:
• 20 years as a Value Added Tax (VAT) specialist in two of the “Big Four” South African auditing firms. Geraldine was responsible for issuing technical opinions that needed to stand up in court, if necessary. The wide range of Geraldine’s VAT experience included industries such as insurance, construction, education, transport, communications, power distribution, information technology, gas, media and advertising. Several technical matters were resolved for local authorities, parastatals and public private partnerships.
• 3 years teaching Mathematics and English at high schools and 5 years giving private extra lessons
• 2 years training forensic auditors in the financial services sector in report-writing skills. This involved teaching the best practice in writing documents so that they clearly state what evidence has been gathered and build a logical progression of events in order to build the basis for a successful conviction of guilty parties. Skills which she trained included: identifying the reader’s needs, choosing the right word, correct language usage, avoidance of jargon, proper email etiquette, correct punctuation, use of parallelism with bullets points, proper prepositions, accurate verb tenses, concord and optimal readability.

Geraldine believes that the task of editing academic work requires focus on:

• the ability to sense an invisible thread linking all the parts of the dissertation/thesis
• the simple explanation of complex, nuanced topics
• the logic of the hypotheses, statistical interpretation and conclusions
• the correctness of spelling, grammar and punctuation
• the consistent use of UK English spelling
• the sense and readability of the content involving logic, consistency, clarity and restricting the length of sentences
• the number of levels of indentation
• the identification of any gaps and the suggestion of what needs to be included
• the flow of the argument, linkages and suggesting writing techniques that will assist
• the relevance of references and citations
• the succinct explanation of the gathered evidence and motivations
• the introduction of concepts before they are discussed
• the removal of unclear statements that do not add value
• the removal of repetitive phrases

Geraldine understands the pressures of reviewing a document in time to meet strict academic deadlines as well as adhering to confidentiality requirements and not plagiarising. She is also prepared to assist with all reasonable requests, such as discussing her comments and assisting with formatting.