Editing & proofreading

Editing is the next step after a copywriter has written a text and you’ve approved the content. An editor checks for errors in usage, grammar, spelling, and punctuation, ensures a consistent tone of voice, and considers many more aspects of the text depending on the level of editing provided.

Proofreading is a further step that happens after your edited content has been formatted for publication. For example, if you’ve produced a white paper, proofreading would happen after you’ve laid out your edited text in PDF format alongside all visual elements. A proofreader looks for any errors that may have been missed during editing or slipped into the final version as a result of last-minute changes, along with any layout-related issues, inconsistencies in charts or infographics, and so on.

I charge a per-word rate for texts that can be edited in Microsoft Word or Google Docs, including blog posts, case studies, white papers, and landing pages. I charge an hourly rate when content cannot be edited in a word processor using standard editing tools. The effort required to edit subtitles embedded in video content, check UI texts in Figma, mark up PDF documents, and perform other editing and proofreading tasks outside of word processing software is often greater than the word count might suggest.

Out of concern for intellectual property, privacy, and data security, I do not feed clients’ texts into tools such as ChatGPT that are based on large language models (LLMs) or into other third-party tools such as Grammarly, Hemingway App, or Ludwig.guru that gain access to data and process it on their own servers. While I recognize that some clients may wish to use these or similar tools in their own writing process, I use them only in limited ways to complement my editing workflow.

For example, I may ask ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot about differences in connotation between two phrases (example prompt: “difference in connotation: to loan vs to lend”), or I might consider examples of usage for a particular phrase in Ludwig (entering a few words that do not disclose company/client names or potentially sensitive information).