Nine Reasons Your Business Needs a Copy Editor

Every writer in the world needs a copy editor. Best-selling novelists, newspaper columnists, corporate communications pros—everybody. Even editors need a second set of professional eyes on their work.

Copy editing involves much more than fixing typos at the last minute. That’s the proofreader’s job, though proofreading can be rolled into copy editing. In addition to correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes, copy editors improve the style and clarity of language, clean up awkward phrasing, remove redundant material, ask for additional details as needed, and improve the overall flow. They ensure your material is logical, consistent, and persuasive, and that one thing naturally follows another. In short, they ensure that what you’ve produced is as professional as it possibly can be.

Although every newspaper, magazine, and publishing company in the United States employs in-house or freelance copy editors, many businesses think they don’t have to—even though copy editing adds relatively little to the marketing and communications budget.

Here are nine reasons why businesses should reconsider:

1. Your content isn’t ready yet. Skipping the editorial process and pressing publish too soon is the communications equivalent of flying an airplane without a safety inspection. Every error reduces customer confidence in your business, and glaring errors can shatter it.
2. You need a professional pair of eyes. No writer on earth can edit their own work—including your staff writers. Since you wouldn’t ask someone who isn’t an accountant to double-check your taxes, or someone who isn’t a lawyer to look over your legal brief for mistakes, it’s best to hire a professional who is trained to spot errors and knows how to fix them.
3. You need an objective, unbiased perspective. Colleagues won’t hesitate to point out a missing comma or misspelled word (if they’re sharp enough to spot them), but they may be too shy to say an entire paragraph needs to be rewritten from scratch.
4. You need an external viewpoint. Someone who is unfamiliar with your business, or at least less familiar than those who work there every day, will know right away if you aren’t explaining yourself properly to people outside your organization.
5. You need a technical and corporate translator. All businesses need someone who can convert technical and corporate jargon into standard English that their customers can easily understand and relate to.
6. You’re too close to your own work. You know what you’re trying to say. That doesn’t mean everyone else will.
7. You can’t afford to embarrass yourself. You can only make one first impression, and you don’t want to embarrass yourself by publishing errors that a professional can easily fix.
8. You deserve the best possible product. A professional editor will do more than just fix your mistakes; he or she can dramatically improve the content of your writing, raising the quality of your entire organization’s output.
9. Your writers will improve. Regular editorial feedback is akin to ongoing professional development. Your writers will never stop needing an editor, but they’ll produce better and better content over time.

The editorial staff at reddbug have helped clients like Adobe, Microsoft, and Amazon take their content to the next level. Contact us if you’d like our help. We can even provide a free sample edit. We hope to hear from you soon.