People hire a freelance editor for various reasons. Here are just some of them:
- “I want to hire a freelance editor to make sure my research paper has the highest chances of being accepted by a top journal.”
- “Our paper was rejected, and we need to have it professionally edited before we can resubmit.”
- “This is a patchwork report, so it needs a coherent voice and style.”
- “My English is a bit rusty and I know I make mistakes, so I must hire a freelance editor.”
- “The copy needs to be flawless, but I don’t have time to edit it myself.”
- “Some reviewers said my [self-published] book needs language editing.”
Some authors, however, are ashamed they need to hire a freelance editor. They say, “I’m not a bad writer, but…”
- “I’ve been told my book manuscript needs language editing, and my publisher’s copyeditors don’t do this kind of editing”,
- “the person who evaluated my manuscript said it needs more work but I’m not sure what”,
- “punctuation is my Achilles’ heel”,
- “I don’t think this paper is as good as it can be”, or
- “I’ve been advised to hire a freelance copyeditor”.
No one should be embarrassed to hire a freelance editor. The fact you need professional language editing services doesn’t make you a bad writer. Here is what I tell people who are reluctant to hire an editor.
Hiring a freelance editor doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer
If you need to improve your fitness, you hire a personal trainer. If you need to improve your manuscript, you hire a freelance editor. Asking the help of a professional trainer to get back in shape doesn’t mean you’re lazy. Likewise, asking the help of a freelance editor doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer.
A professional editor will edit your document more efficiently than you could if you had the time and skills necessary to do the work yourself. There are several reasons hiring a freelance editor is a wise decision:
Writing is not the same as editing
Writing and editing are different but complementary skills. A talented writer is not automatically a good editor. Vice versa, a good editor is not automatically a talented writer.
“If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard”, said William Zinsser in On Writing Well.
Good writing requires effort and time. Your draft needs revising, sometimes rewriting, editing, and proofreading. Even if you’re a professional writer, completing rounds and rounds of revisions will eventually make you lose interest in your work. Without enthusiasm, you risk missing deadlines or even fail to bring your draft to a publishable form.
Hiring a freelance copyeditor doesn’t mean you can’t write well, but that you’re serious about your writing and want to improve what you’ve written.
Entrusting your manuscript to a professional language editor is a smart way to perfect your manuscript in a short amount of time.
You tend to be subjective when you edit your own work
As the author, you know what you meant to write, even if you didn’t write everything you wanted to. If your story or your argument is incomplete, your brain will fill in the gaps when you read the text.
But unlike you, your reader won’t know what you meant to write, but only what you wrote. A freelance editor can put themselves in the reader’s shoes and point out the weak points of your manuscript.
An editor can be objective because they don’t know the thought process you put into your manuscript but will see only what’s on paper. If there are any gaps in your arguments, an experienced editor will find and fix them. You’ll then be able to present a complete and coherent story to the reader.
Errors are elusive
We read words, not letters. So, even if words are misspelled, our brain automatically corrects them so that we can get the meaning of the sentence. Editors, howver, are tranied to raed wodrs leettr by leettr to ctach misllpielgiss. This should have been “Editors, however, are trained to read words letter by letter to catch misspellings”, but you were probably able to understand the misspelled version anyway.
If your eye is not used to finding errors, you tend to miss them. And no automatic grammar checker can replace a human editor—at least not yet.
An effective way to find the errors in your document is to hire a freelance editor. They will peruse your text and correct the mistakes so you can be confident it’s error-free.
Hire a freelance editor, don’t tell—or tell
Even if you’re now less reluctant to hire a freelance editor, you may worry what others will think about you as an author if they know your manuscript was professionally edited.
Not all authors like to disclose they’ve worked with a freelance editor. Some authors don’t think it’s necessary to publicly thank their freelance editor. Others mention the name of their freelance editor in the acknowledgement section of their paper or book.
Getting editing help doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. It means you’re a thoughtful writer. You care about your readers, and you respect the time and effort you’ve invested in your manuscript. Whether you publicly acknowledge you did hire a freelance editor is (usually) up to you, but the fact you got editing help is no reason for embarrassment.
Do you need to hire a freelance editor? Send me a message at editor@languageediting.com.
Related posts:
- Things your freelance editor should tell you
- Why give detailed instructions to your freelance language editor
- Things I’ve learned from eight years of freelance editing
Last revised on 16 July 2022
