Process
Step 1: Cost Estimate, Optional Registration, and Payment
For initial casual enquiries, please go to Contact.
For a Cost Estimate, please email your manuscript(s) together with any specific requirements, including time frame. Registration is optional but has the advantage of saving your details for subsequent sign-in.
If you agree to the costing, you will receive an invoice requesting payment, in any commercially traded currency, through the payment-processing agent PayPal; a straightforward process with no special obligations on your part other than possession of a standard credit card.
Following payment, I will confirm that the requested edit is under way.
Please note, the following conditions apply:
- Pre-payment is mandatory. (See Charges.)
- A minimum charge of US$20 applies.
- Email is the primary means of communication.
- The entire manuscript must be at hand before editing can begin.
- Subsequent changes to the draft may incur an additional fee.
- Manuscripts should conform to MS Office Suit formats (Windows), or AppleWorks 6 or Nisus Writer Pro (Apple).
- Word count determines manuscript length.
- Papers will not be written from machine translations.
- On receiving go-ahead, I will provide a contact phone number.
Step 2: Edit
Once revised, I will return the draft to you with specific comments, questions and recommendations in addition to MS software-based tracking. This process will be repeated as many times as necessary. Consequently, authors should be available to respond to email during critical periods of the edit.
The following points should be noted:
- US spelling will be followed unless otherwise requested.
- Formatting and referencing will conform to common standards, as requested.
- Repeated cycles of feedback will iron out issues and help you make your document consistent with your objective.
- From past experience, up to three cycles of communication or so may be needed for manuscripts requiring substantive reworking.
- The factual content of manuscripts cannot be verified.
- Confidentiality of client data will be maintained.
- Manuscripts, or parts thereof, will not be disseminated in any way.
A “Bill Gates” of his time
2004 stamp commemorating Jokichi Takamine's patent on adrenalin of 1901.
The life of the outstanding scientist and entrepreneur Jokichi Takamine, 1854-1922, provides great insights into the making of an individual unfettered by the clutches of domesticity. We can also see the role of English as a “key” to success. Jokichi used this key expertly for accessing opportunities in science and business, both domestic and abroad, and in exploiting their hidden treasures for tremendous financial gain. A major pioneer in biochemistry and a brilliant businessman, shrewd and anticipatory, Jokichi had a nose for “windfalls,” a man who lost no time in turning discoveries into successful products and finding extensive markets for them.
Studying “foreign science” and English from the age of 12, Jokichi went on to graduate from respected universities in Japan and Scotland. On entering the Japanese government service he set out to establish domestic agrochemical and pharmaceutical industries. Sent to New Orleans representing Japan at the Cotton Centennial Exposition in 1884, he met and married Caroline Field Hitch, a southern belle. On the way back to Japan with his bride, Jokichi, astute as he was, took time off to familiarize himself with American fertilizer manufacture and US patent law. Back in Japan, his first truly momentous breakthrough in research came with his discovery of the diastatic enzyme in rice mold, from which he developed Taka-Diastase, the world's first digestive enzyme preparation.
In 1890 Jokichi returned to the US with his wife and applied for and obtained the patent for his microbial discovery, licensing the production of Taka-Diastase to Parke-Davis, then the largest American drug maker (and currently a subsidiary of Pfizer). Aggressively marketed, the product became enormously successful in America, Japan and elsewhere.
In a stroke of genius, Jokichi had taken a Japanese technology and adapted it to Western industry, the very process of merging ideas across borders seen as imperative for global progress a century later, today!
Further diversifying his research, Jokichi went on to isolate and purify the hormone adrenalin in New York in 1901 - his second major discovery. Obtaining its patent in the US, Japan and England, Jokichi marketed adrenalin in America and elsewhere for a whole range of medical conditions. This discovery became a medical and popular sensation. Cleverly able to cash in on his patents, his massive royalties from world-wide sales of Adrenalin and Taka-Diastase made Jokichi a billionaire in today's U.S. dollars, in effect, a ”Bill Gates” of his time.
Discovery, innovation and commercial application were at the heart of Jokichi's work. He was a man driven from childhood by learning and a love for English as a powerful means in accessing markets - even under often very difficult conditions.