Could you use a copyeditor/proofreader for your work?

Wish you knew when to use its or it’s? Perhaps you’re confused about assure, ensure and insure? Do you flip a coin with who and whom?

Do you try to remember if it’s judgment or judgement? Is your dictionary falling apart because you’re not sure if it’s principal or principle?

Wondering if a story is titled or entitled? Is your snail mail sometimes marked personal or personnel? Do you know when to use fewer and less? Does a glazed look come to your eyes regarding that and which?

Maybe this doesn’t bother you because you’ve learned to rely upon your “trusty” Micro$oft Word spell checker. Let's test your spell checker, shall we? Open up a new Word document in your computer, type “Untied States of America” and fire up your spell checker. Nothing flagged, right? If you think that’s an unfair test, copy and paste the following poem into a new Word document and fire up your “trusty” spell checker again.

Your “trusty” spell checker failed miserably, didn’t it? Do you still trust it? Can you still trust it?

You want your work to be taken seriously. Your work is a reflection of you. Consider then what your work says about you if your work’s riddled with embarrassing misspellings, lapses in logic, sentence misconstruction, paragraph misstructure and poor word choice.

Do you want people to laugh, or worse, ignore your work because you are considered to be one of the 11 million illiterates in America? Do you want them to point out your grammatical mistakes, perhaps cut and paste your text into an E-mail for all to see? Do you really want people to get that impression of you and your work?

How about hiring the services of a copyeditor/proofreader to go over your work and prevent these errors?

I’ve been a copyeditor/proofreader since 1986. You can see my résumé here. I've copyedited and proofread print and on-line financial, general, medical, legal, political articles, books and journals. You can check my references here.

As a copyeditor/proofreader, it is my job to strengthen the fabric of society, held together by a common language, by not having mistakes or inaccuracies distract the readers’ attention from your work while respecting your voice and vision.

Drop me a line at ivan at comparelector dot com (close up the spaces and change “at” to @ and “dot” to .), or use the E-mail form located here, and we can start working together to make your work shine!