Editing Business Copy

Editors are not just for books and stories; we’re also essential for businesses. Whether it’s marketing copy, web copy, product descriptions, video captions, or procedure manuals, the writing that is done for your business needs to be edited.

Potential customers are quickly put off by spelling and grammatical errors on business websites, advertisements, and correspondence. Employees can be confused and make mistakes if instructions are not clearly written.

Errors hurt your credibility with customers, employees, and others in your industry.

Errors in copy can lead customers to wonder if you really know your stuff.

So how does a business solve this problem and prevent errors from cropping up in their copy? There are automated tools available that can help, but they’re not infallible. For example, spell check won’t catch if you accidentally type exist instead of exit, or two instead of too. Word processing grammar checkers often introduce errors because the automated system misses nuance in writing. Automatic voice-to-text software can misinterpret speech and create some pretty spectacular errors (such as “drug sales” instead of “direct sales”).

The easiest way around this is to employ an editor or proofreader to check your copy before it goes live.

 Editors are trained to watch for those pesky typos where one word is accidentally replaced with a similar (though incorrect) word. Editors are trained to catch easily misunderstood phrasing or references that may be too niche or jargony. And humans are much better suited to interpreting nuance!

Best of all, an editor can help your business maintain credibility, gain customer’s trust, and communicate clearly and consistently.

What I’m Working On

To give you an idea of the types of projects I can help you with, here are some projects I’ve worked on this year:

• Transcribing an oral history. I’m currently doing this project for a family member who spent years of visits to relatives recording stories and conversations. She has typed up summaries of the recordings, but now I’m doing a near-verbatim transcription. This will enable various family members to have better access to the information they need to complete personal and family history projects, as well as helping the younger generations get to know the elders better. This has been a fun project to work on as I know these people personally. It has required some effort getting accustomed to accents, but it has been well worth it!

• Copyediting a welcome book for a rental house. This project was a great, short project. This client had written a welcome book for her second home in Hawaii in preparation of having visitors stay unaccompanied. This booklet contained information on caring for the house and yard, finding resources in the local community, and basic requests for those who visit. I was able to help this client maintain consistency throughout the document, look for missing items that a potential visitor might like to know more about, and cleaning up typos and punctuation. Now I need to visit Hawaii.

• Editing a 300-page personal history. I spent several months doing a full, comprehensive edit on a personal history. This edit was extensive, including several full passes, streamlining the formatting, as well as all the usual copyediting tasks. This manuscript consisted of journal entries, letters, and commentary. Much of the text was written by the subject of the history with gaps filled by her children. It was a challenging project to nail down formatting for all these different voices within the text.

As you can see, I work with a variety of materials in my editing and transcription work. I love being in a position to help people take what they have and make it better. Contact me today to get started with your project.

I’m offering discounted rates for projects booked during October and November 2020!