Pro Editing Service - Professional Copy Editing Services

What is Good Copy Editing?

Editing Professionals to meet your needs

Copy editing is a most important and time-consuming task for those involved in the field. It requires the sensitive editorial handling of print material of every kind. And it requires the editor’s close attention to a document’s every detail, its format, and all of its elements; a thorough knowledge of what to look for and of the style to be followed as desired by the author or client; and the ability to make quick, logical, objective, justifiable, and defensible decisions in the correction of spelling, grammar, punctuation, terminology, sentence structure, clarity, conciseness, tone and voice, inconsistencies, and typographical errors. Valued editors are those who know editorial and factual things that others don’t know and who offer keen understanding of an author’s need to advance communication.

A professional editing service will be one that meets the demands of the company or business, perfectly. To find a qualified editing service for your needs, consider the following services that they should be able to provide for you. While it is nice to search out a freelance provider, they too must meet the demands that you have for them. Here are a few things that are virtually mandatory for them to provide for you, the business owner looking for an editing service.

1. They should provide quality work. The work should be right on target and free from any mistakes. This goes for grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation. The writer or proof reader must insure that there are no problems with the flow of the piece as well.

2. It should make sense from start to finish. It is important the piece flows, but it also must make good, logical sense. If the tone is off, the proof readers should be able to guide the copy into being correctly written.

3. It should be guaranteed work. For this reason, it may be necessary to double check work. Regardless, there is no point in looking to a company or a freelance agent who will not provide quality work 100% of the time.

4. The price needs to be right. Let’s face it. Sometimes it is nice to pay a lesser fee, but it is also important that the piece be of good quality. Choose a price that is lower but the quality of the work must stilll be high. It is either right or wrong in this case.

5. A good relationship should be forged. If you can not communicate with the freelance agent or the company, then you have no business with them. They need to be available to answer your questions and fill your needs.

In addition to regularizing those details of style, the copy editor is expected to catch infelicities of expression that mar an author’s prose and impede communication. Such matters include but are by no means limited to dangling participles, misplaced modifiers, mixed metaphors, unclear antecedents, unintentional redundancies, faulty attempts at parallel construction, mistaken junction, overuse of an author’s pet word or phrase, unintentional repetition of words, race or gender or geographic bias, and hyphenating in the predicate, unless, of course, the hyphenated term is an entry in the dictionary and therefore permanently hyphenated in every grammatical case. Job seekers, especially, need to attend to such details in their executive résumé.

o Editors identify by instinct and learn from their experience how much of this kind of editing to do on a particular document.

o Experienced editors recognize and do not tamper with an author’s unusual figures of speech or idiomatic usage that is pertinent to a work.

o They preserve the author’s voice with a view toward the faithful reproduction of the author’s manuscript.

o They silently correct inconsistencies, misusages, and misspellings solely for the purpose of clarifying the unclear.

o They know when to go ahead and make an editorial change or simply suggest it to the author.

o They know when to delete a repetition, when to change it for variation, and when to merely point it out to the author or to job seeker on an executive résumé.

o They respect an author’s right to expect conscientious, intelligent editorial help.

o They never make queries that sound stupid, naive, or pedantic or that seem to reflect upon an author’s scholarly ability or powers of interpretation.

It can be difficult to find this quality of work, but it is necessary in order to have a properly written piece. To find the right professional editing service, you may need to check out several then decide.