EDITING FAQs: Who Needs An Editor?
Anybody who writes
In most aspects of your life, you hire experts in their fields: your landscaper cuts your lawn, your stylist cuts your hair, your accountant cuts your taxes, and they don’t ever trade jobs.
It's the same with communication: if writing is an important part of what you do, you should always have a professional editor on call.
No matter what your creative project is – a website or a public service announcement, a 300-page report or a three-page speech, an academic article or a book of memoirs, an advertising campaign or an in-house newsletter – I’ll always make it look as good as possible.
How can you tell if your work needs editing?
Start by pondering these questions:
- Does your text lack lustre?
- Is your prose muddled?
- Are you never quite sure that you’ve really said what you meant to say?
- Is spelling not your strong suit?
- Do you ever feel that you “can’t get what’s in your head” down onto the page?
- Could your grammar stand improvement?
- Does punctuation leave you puzzled?
- Have you worked on your text for so long that you can’t even see it any more?
- Is organizing your work a chore that makes you sweat?
- Do you have the uneasy feeling that your grade-school English teacher wouldn’t approve of your work?
- Is your material sprawling out of control, escaping all attempts to discipline it?
- Are you juggling so many ideas that you’ve lost your original focus?
If you answered “yes” even once, chances are that you could use the help of a professional editor.
Who ELSE needs an editor?
Even if you’re a brilliant writer, all afire with vivid ideas, you probably still need an editor – because your valuable time is best spent on creative work, not on mere tidying up. That’s why God gave the world editors in the first place: we humble obsessive-compulsive souls were put here just to follow in your footsteps, putting that vital final polish on your work.
So you can safely leave it to the specialists to take care of all the humdrum tasks like dotting the i’s, crossing the t’s, and making sure all the commas are in the right places. That allows you to focus on what you do best: writing.
