Hey, there. I’m Maria Stutzman. I take care of my family, homeschool my children, and proofread obsessively. That’s what I do. I am a child of God; that’s my core identity.
Words and proofreading are part of my design. I vividly remember the day in third grade when Mrs. England taught us the handwritten proofreaders’ marks. I was enchanted. It was like an Easter egg hunt, searching the paragraphs to find all the errors. From then on, I never stopped proofreading.
Although I majored in music, I took lots of composition and literature classes in college, assisting my profs and tutoring my peers as the English department scholar. This background in composition and literature, as well as the love of books inherited from my parents and grandmothers, has served me well in my years as a proofreader. All the vocabulary, history, science, trivia, and quality writing I’ve absorbed as I read for pleasure or research assist me in finding errors as a proofreader and editor.
I’ve proofed and copy edited the following:
novels, nonfiction, and devotional books
articles and booklets for a
stewardship and investment companya clothing company catalog
sheet music and a music website
accounting blog posts
legal transcripts
student essays
and a whole foods cookbook.
I graduated from Transcript Proofreading: Theory and Practice™, which teaches the art of proofreading legal transcripts. Although the focus is legal transcripts, the course sharpened my skills as a general proofreader as well.
All those college essays I wrote, the stacks of books I’ve read, the proofreading course I worked through, the wide variety of materials I’ve proofed and edited—all of that experience is here to serve you, to make your transcript or writing look and sound good.