Why hire an editor?

Writers often underestimate the work of an editor. We don’t spend our days just crossing t’s and dotting i’s. We are grammarians and Microsoft Office wizzes. We work methodically to ensure consistency in style and language—consulting countless books on professional editing practice for every job we do.

Professional editing aims to perfect presentation and clarity of meaning, so your readers understand your writing exactly as you intended. Professional editors:

• improve the general quality of writing
• prevent the publication of misinformation
• help authors follow the principles of simple English for the comprehension of all readers
• safeguard the livelihoods of innocents signing legal contracts that they may not fully read or understand
• ensure effective use of illustrations, tables and diagrams
• ensure that acknowledgments are given where they are due—we are the protectors of original prose
• turn the reader’s experience from mediocre and clunky to effortless and smooth

As your editor, I embrace these responsibilities and I promise to have the knowledge and tools to fulfil them. As Elsie Myers Stainton says in her book, The Fine Art of Copyediting, ‘The good copyeditor, above all, is a fusspot—one who cares’.

Even adept writers need a fresh set of scrutinising eyes to check their work. I may be a professional editor, but my talent for spotting mistakes in other people’s writing falls by the wayside when I edit my own work. When you are too close to a document your brain no longer registers the errors. It is like when you walk into a loud room and at first the noise bothers you, but before long your brain actively filters it out. The same goes for words on a page or screen—if you spend long enough staring at them, you stop noticing the errors. To avoid becoming too familiar with a document and falling into this trap with client work, editors practice ‘critical distance’. That means we allow time away from the document and then recheck it for an elite edit with minimal errors.

In the words of late American Novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘Easy reading is damn hard writing’. So please don’t think you have to go it alone. It is difficult to edit your own work, and technology is not clever enough to do it for you. Hiring a professional editor is the only path to polished writing. So, if you plan to send your work into the wide world of public scrutiny, you need an editor to boost your confidence and preserve your integrity.