Why You Should Hire a Professional Editor, by Muse Sigrid

Specialty: Career

Sigrid Macdonald: Copy Editor, Book Coach, Writer

Bio: Sigrid Macdonald has written two full-length books and her articles have appeared in Canada's largest newspaper, The Globe and Mail; The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter in Washington, DC; the American magazine Justice Denied; and the Toastmaster. Sigrid edits fiction, nonfiction, short stories, websites and biographies, and helps people who feel stuck with their writing. Originally from New Jersey, Sigrid now resides in Ontario, Canada.

Sigrid is a Muse who believes that more is learned from failure than success.

Why You Should Hire a Professional Copy Editor

Many seasoned writers, myself included, balk at the idea of hiring a copy editor. We've been writing for years; we know grammar and sentence structure. Why put out good money to have someone else do exactly what we can do? Or worse - the editor may want to change our voice, our style and our tone. Who needs that? You do!

Whether you are brand-new to writing or you're an old pro, there are two very good reasons why you shouldn't edit your own work.

One. To err is human but to forgive is unlikely in the publishing world! We all make mistakes. Unless you're a machine, chances are good that you'll make errors along the way and you won't always recognize them. Typos are easy to miss and sometimes they're quite embarrassing.

You've just finished a short story and you're thrilled. Then you receive a call from a friend who says she got a good laugh out of the part that said the demonic neighbor in your horror piece was "a paint in the neck." Duh! How did that happen? You read it over at least five times but somehow your brain skipped that part, and your spell-check missed it because paint is spelled properly.

There was an interesting blurb that used to circulate on e-mail, which strung letters together. It looked like gibberish at first, but then it made sense. It went something like this: ifucnredthsthnknashltechr. Did that take you long to figure out? Probably not. That's because our mind expects to see certain characters and fills in the blanks. In the sentence, "I went to school house," we often see the preposition "the," even though it's not there.

Two. You don't know everything. I just pointed out how easy it is to miss mistakes that you already know. What about things you don't know?

Some people have trouble conjugating the verb "to be," particularly in the subjunctive (when to use "if I were" and when to use "if I was").

Other people have problems with the word "like." Today, my mother said to me, "I feel like a bowl of soup." I replied, "You don't look like a bowl of soup," and she grimaced. Ordinarily the family grammarian, my mother would have been better off saying, "I feel like having a bowl of soup" unless indeed she felt wet, warm and slushy.

A professional editor not only has the objectivity that you will certainly lack after spending dozens, if not hundreds, of hours on an article or manuscript, but she or he will also know the rules of grammar that you don't know because ideally, she relies on a style guide, which tells her exactly where to place a comma or how to capitalize a certain term. It's great to have friends and colleagues review your manuscript in its early stages, but if you're serious about publication, do yourself a favor and hire a professional for the final edit.

Contact Information:

Copyright Protection and Reprint Rights: This article and accompanying sidebar are fully copyrighted by the author, but can be reprinted without permission provided the article links back to this page: http://www.800Muses.com/muse-profiles/muse-sigrid.htm