First Impressions
One of my favorite quotes: You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Good writing comes from good editing. As a professional editor, I look for more than spelling and grammar, I serve to be your coach and confidante and help you appear more credible.
What does an editor do for you?
Copy editors revise content to ensure clarity and accuracy, and they must have a strong grasp of the English language. They are your champion and work on your behalf by checking spelling, grammar, language, and style errors. They work with you to improve the original draft, reshaping and trimming the text into a piece ready to be published. They will also look for:
Clarity – Is your writing clear and the reader can easily follow along, or are they lost?
Voice and tone – Voice expresses you or your company’s basic personality: practical, authoritative, trendy, etc. Tone expresses the mood or feeling of the voice: friendly, excited, educational, formal, offensive, positive, and negative.
Punctuation – Missing punctuation or backward apostrophes and quotation marks.
Transitions – Do paragraphs flow nicely from one to the next?
Sourcing – Ensuring statistics and dates are current and sourcing them.
Misleading statements – Reviewing for promissory statements or anything else that might be misleading.
Credibility
Your credibility matters and you want to be trusted. Errors undermine the validity of what you are writing. Your goal is to deliver a clear, consistent message to all of your clients and prospects.
Perception
Readers really do care about what they read and if there are errors. My colleague and friend, Professor Fred Vultee, performed a study on the value of copyediting. Audiences can tell when something isn’t carefully edited, and it affects their perceptions about the content and their willingness to pay for it.
Say it with Steele, x C