The highest-level edit I offer is a substantive edit. This is an edit that focuses entirely on the content of what you’ve written, not technical matters such as grammar and spelling. If you choose this, when you get your document back, it won’t have a lot of changes in the text. Instead, it will have lots of comments added.
If you’re making an argument, those comments will include objections you might want to respond to. (As a graduate student in philosophy, one of my strengths — even by comparison to other philosophers — was my ability to get into an argument’s intellectual framework and challenge it on its own terms.) I’ll identify places where citations or other support should be added. I may occasionally note a dubious factual assertion.
If you’re telling a fantasy or science-fiction story, I’ll check the consistency of your universe: When there’s an unexplained contradiction between the way magic or an imagined technology works in one scene and how it works in another, that makes your world less credible. The same is true of inconsistencies in law or in how your imagined political system works.
Whatever the nature of your project, I might suggest reorganizing or reordering some elements of it. I might identify things you’re taking for granted that the reader does not know or might have forgotten.
So tell me: What can I do for you?