MEPERL empowers your words to empower your message.
Merrill Perlman Consulting offers customized editing, training, coaching, and workflow consulting to individuals, media organizations, nonprofits, corporations, law firms, and educational institutions.
Comprehensive Editorial & Communications Solutions
With more than 40 years of experience in journalism, higher education, and corporate communications, Meperl helps you and your team communicate with clarity, authority, and impact.
Editing
Careful, collaborative attention to your content at all levels — from big-picture developmental structure and narrative shaping to meticulous line editing, fact-checking, grammar, and style.
Learn about Editing →Training
Engaging, customized workshops and presentations in person or online, from grammar mastery to self-editing and structural organization for any type of communication.
Explore Training →Consulting
Editorial workflow auditing, newsroom restructuring, talent recruiting, and bespoke corporate stylebook creation to streamline team communication, eliminate ambiguity, and amplify your brand.
Discover Consulting →Coaching
One-on-one supportive mentoring for writers and editors. Learn proven structural frameworks appropriate to that communication to elevate your prose.
Explore Coaching →
Former Director of Copy Desks, The New York Times
A National Reputation in Journalism & Editing
Merrill Perlman spent 25 years at The New York Times in roles including director of copy desks, manager of staff editor recruiting, and managing editor of The New York Times News Service.
For more than 20 years, she was an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and for 18 years she has been the copy editor of Pulitzer Prize entry letters for The Times. She is a 2015 recipient of the prestigious Missouri Honor Medal in Journalism.
Trusted by Top Publications, Authors, & Institutions
Notable Authors & Edited Publications
From Kindle Singles by bestselling authors to definitive manuals of style and Pulitzer Prize submissions.
Guns
Copy editor for Stephen King’s widely discussed non-fiction essay examining gun ownership, violence, and common-sense reform in America.
Moonshot!
Comprehensive editing for the former Apple and PepsiCo CEO’s strategic guide on customer-driven transformation in billion-dollar businesses.
If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?
Copy editing on the celebrated posthumous collection of Vonnegut’s commencement addresses and essays on kindness and community.
Getting More
Detailed line editing on the renowned negotiation framework used by global leaders, business schools, and Fortune 500 companies.
Praise from Colleagues & Clients
“You could scour the journalism and publishing worlds for a lifetime and never find an editor as good as Merrill Perlman. She is tough, sensible, rigorous and devoted to the power of words, which she approaches with an unmatched degree of erudition and respect. She has also successfully managed a large group of idiosyncratic and sometimes cranky professionals (the copy editors of The New York Times). This is a crowd that doesn’t dispense respect easily. Even in this demanding group, Merrill’s editing was regarded with awe.”
“Merrill Perlman is, quite simply, a master of the art and craft of copy editing. As a practitioner, a manager and a teacher, she knows every facet -- from the nuances of word choice to the complexities of the copy editor personality. When I worked under Merrill, the Times copy desk organization ran like clockwork because of her sure hand and clear direction. I’ll also throw in a word about her people skills: They’re second to none. She approaches her work with humor and humanity.”
“We hired Merrill to put together and deliver a customized copyedit training course for a team of a dozen editors. We were very pleased with both her preparation and results. She was not just thorough and precise, but very communicative and customer service-oriented. We certainly recommend her work, whatever your editing needs.”
“I learned more about writing and managing my work in three weeks with Merrill than I have in my entire 15-year career. I didn’t want to let her go after the course ended. Her approach is welcoming, respectful, honest and funny. Every newsroom, every writer, needs a Merrill.”
“I’m a prickly writer — defensive when I’m wrong and imperious when I’m right — but there has never been a moment when I questioned Merrill’s critique of anything I’ve written. She’s gentle and deferential, but she’s meticulous, and she’s always right.”
“Merrill is an editor’s editor. But there’s more. She is also a writer’s editor, because she makes good stories great, work that will make the writer proud without feeling a loss of ownership. And, perhaps most important, she is a reader’s editor. As much as she can make stories better, her coaching makes for better editors. She’s a wonderful person to work for, and with, and she makes it all look effortless.”