Your document has been written by an expert, spellchecked, expensively designed, put into a website or page make-up program, and is ready to send to your printer or web provider — but it may not be ready for publishing.
Two vital steps are missing: editing and proofreading.
Editing is refining, or filtering, your text through
a disinterested ear. The filter catches unintentional insults, wrong words, haughty phrasing, jargon not understood by some readers, ambiguous sentences, lumpy paragraphs, and
so on. (The examples below the next red line are from real life.) Editing is like invisible mending—you'll notice it only if it hasn't
been done.
Proofreading looks fro
for end and fonds
finds mistakes which that
spell
spelling chequers checkers
do not, and sees a hyphen (-) when there should be a dash (—), plus many
other odds and ends such as too
two spaces between words.
Editing and proofreading are cheaper than you think—yet many organisations
spend tens of thousands on a document that's ruined for want of a $400
proofread or edit by a publishing professional who does nothing else.
Insult: In a sunny country like Australia we must use sunscreen because our fair skins are easy to burn.
Wrong word: Uninterested for disinterested — tantamount for paramount.
Haughty phrase: Ammonium nitrate supply will be restricted because of its propensity to be able to be misused.
Jargon or pointless academic bilge: The Queer way of holiness implies colonial mobilizations such as in the movement of ultimate negation, anticipated somehow by the theology of limbo and re-appropriated in a queer reading of hell as a space of options.
Ambiguous: Forty-five odd people from the congregation turned up.
Lumpy: Paramount Studio has tapped Ryan Murphy for "Need", signing the "Nip/Tuck" creator-exec producer to helm the psychological thriller set up at Sony-based Escape Artists.
To get an idea of how much you may have to spend, send me a rough count of how many words you have, plus a few typical sample pages. It's often impossible to give a watertight quote, but we can, at least, get started. Send an email from here.
(To avoid junk-mail filters, please fill in the "subject" field).
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