Twenty-Two Reasons Why You Should Work with a Copyeditor or Proofreader

Are you wondering if it’s worth the money to hire a proofreader or copyeditor? Here are some points to consider.

1. A good proofreader or copyeditor is familiar with current industry standards and publisher expectations. They have been trained and know what to look for.

2. People aren’t good at recognizing their own blind spots. We don’t know what we don’t know.

3. It’s easy to read intent into your own writing. You know what you mean, but sometimes you might not communicate the intended meaning to the reader. A proofreader or copyeditor will notice this.

4. In our culture of abbreviated communication via texting and messaging, some writers haven’t practiced the basics of punctuation, spelling, and grammar.

5. Similar words are easily confused: there-their-they’re, who-whom, whose-who’s, affect-effect, regime-regimen-regiment, tenet-tenant, were-where-we’re, dun-done, weather-whether, gaff-gaffe, fiance-fiancee, discrete-discreet, accept-except, capitol-capital, principle-principal, canvas-canvass, desert-dessert, and dozens more. I recently read a novel in which there were current bushes. Oh, how I wanted to contact the author and proofread that book!

6. You want the story to stand out, not the errors. You don’t want your readers to be distracted by formatting mistakes, wrong words, and typos.

7. What a nightmare if you notice obvious errors in your published book. You can be sure that your readers will find them! Your reputation as an author is either improved or damaged by the details.

8. No one remembers every rule of grammar, punctuation, usage, spelling, subject-verb agreement, plural possessives, and everything else. The reference book I use most is a thousand pages long. That’s a lot of rules, and the book doesn’t even cover all aspects of grammar! When more eyes are on the manuscript, more errors will be caught.

9. Proofreaders and copyeditors use the most respected and current resources to find answers.

10. Proofreaders and copyeditors understand the difference between an en dash, an em dash, and a hyphen, and they know when to use each one. If they are unsure, they know where to find answers. The same is true of colons and semicolons.

11. A good proofreader or copyeditor will recognize dangling participles or misplaced modifiers and will know how to fix them.

12. A good proofreader or copyeditor will be familiar with the royal order of adjectives.

13. A good proofreader or copyeditor will check for consistency in table of contents, chapter titles, epigraphs, word usage, fonts, and more.

14. None of us received only perfect scores in school and college on all compositions, research papers, grammar assignments, vocabulary quizzes, and spelling tests. How much more important is our best work in a book that has the potential to be read by thousands!

15. Some People Capitalize All words they Think are Important. They Capitalize their Favorite Words even though there is No Reason to Capitalize them. Too much capitalization makes capitalization meaningless. A good proofreader or copyeditor follows the rules of capitalization.

16. A good proofreader or copyeditor recognizes run-on sentences and comma splices and knows how to correct them.

17. Editing software and spellchecking programs can be helpful, but they are sometimes wrong. They don’t understand complex sentences, context, or personal style.

18. Writers sometimes get too creative with dialogue tags. “ ‘I’ll call you later,’ she winked.” “ ‘You hurt my feelings,’ he pouted.” A good proofreader or copyeditor knows that words cannot be winked or pouted or shrugged.

19. Honestly, some authors overuse their favorite words and phrases. I don’t honestly know if they recognize the repetition, but it can honestly become irritating to the reader. Honest!

20. The rules for numbers are confusing. Should you write 99 or ninety-nine or ninety nine? Five fifteen or five-fifteen or 5:15? A.M. or a.m.? Two thousand or 2,000 or 2000? Four and a half or four-and-a-half or 4.5 or 4-1/2 or 4½?

21. Many editors and proofreaders are also authors. Even with their expertise, they recognize the need to hire editors and proofreaders to refine their work and find pesky little errors. Some books by best-selling authors go through four levels of editing and several levels of proofreading before publication!

22. If you study and learn from the suggestions and comments given by a good proofreader, you will become a better writer.