Editing is a critical part of the writing process. All types of content—manuals, standard operating procedures, training materials, social media, websites, and marketing—should be reviewed by a professional copy editor to ensure quality, consistency, and accuracy.
Common mishaps like poor readability, incorrect word choice, typographical errors, and inconsistency in voice or style can create confusion. Grammatical errors and typos can damage your credibility.
What Is Copy Editing?
Copy editing is the review of written materials by a professional editor to ensure that the content (or copy) is free of errors. That’s the short answer.
A copy editor (CE) specializes in effectively and thoughtfully reviewing and improving copy written by others. A CE reviews the big picture—syntax, grammar, punctuation, spelling, messaging, and tone—to evaluate the copy’s suitability for your audience. A CE also ensures that the client’s specified writing and citation styles are followed. Copy editors have a special aptitude for communicating about the writing process. Depending on a client’s needs, a CE can query the client, offering rationales and suggestions, while leaving the final changes to the client, or a CE can directly alter the client’s copy.
The copy editing process can include the following activities:
- Correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors.
- Checking for run-on sentences, wordiness, awkward constructions, missing or incorrect pronoun antecedents, and vague language.
- Making note of loaded language, insider terminology, and bias.
- Ensuring that copy adheres to the appropriate corporate or industry-specific style guides. Style standards include specific capitalization, hyphenation, and comma rules.
- Entering corrections directly into the file (such as Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF) while preserving the ability to undo revisions.
- Fact-checking content to ensure accuracy.
Does My Business Need Copy Editing?
You bet. Any organization or business that produces copy needs a copy editor. Copy editing solves a variety of problems for companies, primary being the embarrassment of a glaring error that lessens the impact of your brand. We’ve all seen errors in advertisements and product manuals. Sometimes they merely get our attention; other times they confuse or mislead.
Traditionally, book publishers, newspapers, magazines, and the publishing industry at large employed copy editors in large editing departments. Now, online publications, digital media agencies, and savvy, image-conscious businesses contract with external copy editors. Many copy editors, like ProEdit’s, work remotely to complete on-demand copy editing jobs for clients in all industries.
About ProEdit’s Copy Editors
Our professional copy editors focus on improving the quality of content for your audience. Our copy editors are proficient in all forms of content editing:
- Mechanical editing, aligning the copy with a particular style guide or style sheet
- Line-by-line editing to ensure plain language and consistency of nomenclature while omitting redundancy, passive tense, punctuation errors, and wordiness
- Book editing and online editing, ensuring text and headings follow manuscript layout for print or digital publication
- Developmental editing, helping an author give clarity to their ideas and voice
- Substantive editing, like ensuring consistency of structure and organization
- Proofreading, including the use of template styles, italics and bold text, use of numerals, etc.
Our editors are proficient in a variety of style guides, including the Associated Press Stylebook, The Chicago Manual of Style, the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, and Microsoft’s standards for technical editing, among others.
ProEdit will consult with you and provide suggestions for making your content clearer and more effective for your target audience.
Don’t have a corporate style sheet? ProEdit’s copy editors can create one for you!
Is Copy Editing the Same as Rewriting?
Not exactly. A copy editor’s job is not primarily to rewrite the material. But sometimes it’s necessary. Maybe the original author doesn’t have the time to make significant changes, or the original authors may be writing in another language.
ProEdit also offers content rewriting services: You do the research and create the first draft, and we’ll take it from there! We’ll work with you to develop that draft into quality content that resonates with your audience.
“But Copy Editing is Expensive!”
So is a critical error in your brand’s content. Copy editing has a high value against the risk of leaving copy unedited. ProEdit has been in the copy editing business since its inception. We have seen every type of editing project and every type of costly error impact a business.
The algorithms of Microsoft Word, Grammarly, or other “spell checkers” will only get you so far, often leaving the most egregious errors unnoted and uncorrected. Language is a dynamic medium, and communicating effectively with a target audience requires skills that AI has not mastered.
Find out how ProEdit’s copy editing services can serve you.