Editing Services

When Do I Need an Editor?

Most of our competitors answer this question as follows, without stating it outright: You need an editor because I need customers for my editing service, and I think you may be a customer. Not only is this answer lazy and stupid, it’s downright selfish.

So no, we won’t lazily contend that everyone needs an editor.

However, behind most great novels, articles, nonfiction books, blog posts, white papers, ghostwritten works, and other forms of written content, there is an editor who’s relied on various skill sets that, while different from the skills of a writer, are indirectly related. The task of an editor is simple:

Editors are responsible for ensuring the first draft of a written work fulfills its intended objectives, thereby turning the content into a final or second draft.

Why would anybody need such a service? Well, in the words of Ernest Hemingway, who many consider to be the greatest writer who ever lived, “A first draft of anything is “*s*%t.” Notice how Ernest doesn’t exclude first drafts of his own work in this statement. That’s why he hired William Maxwell Evarts “Max” Perkins to edit his content.

If writers of Ernest Hemingway’s stature can’t do without editors, surely the rest of us should have them.

No matter how skilled the writer, having an editor is usually the best policy. From Gordon Lish’s editing role with the great American short story writer Raymond Carver, to Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s cherished editor in Alan Rinzler, every great work of prose, copy, and journalism is either edited or proofread prior to its publication.

Examples of When Editors Should Be Hired

Your organization is rebranding, and its written content also needs overhauling

You’ve produced numerous blogs and other forms of written content to improve your SEO, but are not seeing results after a year’s worth (or more) of work on these projects

You’ve produced any written work that you feel somehow “misses the mark,” and aren’t sure how to fix it

The work you’ve produced is as good as you feel it possibly can be, but you are not a professional writer

You need a sense of how your written work will sound to the document’s intended audience

You’re about to submit a book to an agent for publishing, but would like to have it reviewed first

Can’t I Just Use Grammarly, Spell Check Tools, or Word Processing Editors?

The short answer is yes. The accurate answer is that it depends on how seriously you want your writing to be taken. Not everyone must write (nor should they be expected to write) like a true born-and-bred grammarian. To an untrained non-editor’s eye, Grammarly may seem like an essential tool for anybody tasked with writing. For projects in which the writing isn’t the emphasis of the work itself and merely a subcomponent of the project itself, tools like Grammarly suffice. For example, a PowerPoint presentation given to a small, internal audience at your office. While Grammarly is a convenient and helpful tool that’s easy to configure and access in a range of different word processors like Google Docs and WordPress, it has numerous limitations that make it a poor fit for any serious publisher whose readership is educated enough to catch its errors. This is one thing that tools like Grammarly have in common with their even more seductive AI content-generating counterparts. At best, these automated technologies are mediocre proofreaders, not editors.

What’s the Difference Between a Proofreader and an Editor?

All proofreading is editing, but not all editing is proofreading. Moreover, proofreading is best described as editing with a very limited scope, and in a way that makes very little substantial change to the original draft of a document. Therefore, editing is more immersive and in-depth than proofreading, regardless of format, platform, audience, or purpose of the document in question. For example, proofreading merely eliminates grammatical, spelling, and sometimes simple errors in word choice. In contrast, editing may involve a wide-ranging set of document changes, from shifting the entire focus of a written work in each sentence to better fit the writer’s intention to structural or organizational changes in the content itself.

So, What Can an Editor Do that My Cheap Automated Editing Tool Can’t?

We never thought you’d ask, but we’re glad you did. At the outset, we’ll answer your question in the next sentence, but more details are below if you need them. Grammarly offers human editing services because it knows the limitations of its own editing technology.

Game over, but keep reading if you’d like.

You Have to Tell Grammarly How to Edit Your Documents

You have to tell Grammarly how to function by telling it how to handle the mistakes it makes. And how is one supposed to do that without an editing background, exactly?

What’s our source for this claim? The “Deactivating certain suggestion types” portion of Grammarly’s User Guide. A skilled editor simply sees the document and knows how to edit it per his or her experience and the focus of the document itself, which parlays well into our next important editor-vs-plug-in distinction.

Grammarly and Word Processing AI Doesn’t Conform to Specific Style Guides

If you wanted to edit your document according to a specific style guide in Grammarly, you’d have to tell it how to edit it for each minute detail until you self-programmed it to conform to a specific style guide.

Kinds of Style Guides for Which We’ve Edited Documents

WordWoven staff can edit documents according to any of the below style guides, many of which are updated annually. Given the fact these non-profits update their style guides each year, a human editor with experience in editing for each particular format is more likely to give you the desired results than an AI-based tool.

American Medical Association (AMA) Manual of Style

Modern Language Association (MLA)

Associated Press (AP) Style Book

The Chicago Manual of Style

American Psychological Association (APA)

Most Free or Cheap Editing Tools Have a ‘Fast and Loose Grip’ on Accuracy in their Tone

Don’t let a tone dropdown menu fool you. It’s much more complicated than that: Even advanced natural language processors (NLPs) fail to grasp 40-50% of the correct word choice (in our estimation) available to the writer, and that’s just for the sliver of the 171,000 words in the English language that these tools know, let alone the many words they don’t know. This is why overreliance on these tools becomes especially problematic under two conditions in a marketing and copywriting context, which always co-occur:

Your brand’s presence depends on copy (written language) because your target customer consumes information primarily as a reader.

When condition 1 above occurs, the brand fails to establish the correct tone consistently, which always detracts from the message of a brand.

While our staff has seldom been asked to alter work once turned in, WordWoven offers an unlimited number of edits for each of its services, and any edits, much like the writing itself, will be completed in a timely fashion. We will write until the project is to your liking, and at no additional cost. WordWoven will edit any document, according to any style guide.

Not only will our editors catch typos and grammatical errors commonly overlooked by online grammar plug-in tools like grammarly, each document edited will have a coherent, resonant, and compelling argument carried by optimal word choice and relevance to the target audience. WordWoven offers an unlimited number of edits for each of its services. We will write until the project is to your liking, and at no additional cost.

WordWoven’s Editing Services and Pricing

We offer an unlimited number of edits until a document has reached your standards. WordWoven doesn’t always charge an hourly rate for each editing project. Rather, we charge in cents per word, dollars per page, a flat fee for each edited item, or work with your suggested contract payment plans. In addition to quick turnaround time, at WordWoven, we have experience editing documents for all of our writing services.

Given the range of writing objectives, platforms, and projects we’ve completed, WordWoven’s editorial capacity is comparatively large compared to other editing services and freelance editors. The most common kinds of document editing inquiries we receive (which have informed and contributed to our staff’s editing expertise) are as follows, with pricing:

Proofreading – 10 (¢) Per Word

This includes proofreading for any form of written content, whether technical documentation, blogs, or copy. If you’re unclear how proofreading differs from editing, please scroll back up on this page to the section on the differences between proofreading and editing: Proofreading provides less value than editing, but may still be worthwhile depending on the style guide to which your written work should conform.

Copyediting and Content Editing – 25 (¢) Per Word

This involves any form of our copywriting services that require editing, from short-tail print ad copy to video headlines. This would also involve editing of any form of content that falls under our content writing services, such as eBook editing, SEO content editing, blog editing, and article editing.

Script Editing – $200 Per Item

This includes speeches, video scripts, or other narratives in which the written word will serve as the developmental idea for the content’s production via another medium.

Technical Editing – 30 (¢) Per Word

This includes software user manuals, medical equipment user manuals, and white paper editing.

Book and Novel Editing – $1,500 Per 10,000 Words

This includes non-fiction book editing, fiction book editing, biographies, novel-length short story collections, and novellas.

Managing Editor or Editorial Director – Contract Price Varies

Please call for pricing or fill out the web form below to book a free 15-minute consultation. For a general idea of how these services may be priced, visit our marketing consultant services page.