When I was exploring options for a career in freelance writing, I discovered there are people out there who provide copy-editing and proofreading services to businesses, to publishers and to students writing theses and dissertations.

I knew what proofreading was, and thought I was pretty good at that. Over the course of my engineering career, I had always enjoyed proofreading my colleagues’ documents before they issued them.

But, copy-editing?

The term was unfamiliar. However, once I found a definition, I realised that copy-editing was also what I did when checking my colleagues’ reports and letters, and that part of the checking was what I actually found most enjoyable.

Here’s a good definition, from the notes I received from the New Zealand Writers College ‘Practical Copy-editing and Proofreading’ course:

‘...the proofreader is wholly focused on errors of consistency, fact, layout, spelling, punctuation, or grammar—rather than sense, impression and style, which are the copy-editor’s concern.’

And that got me thinking.

I like reading.

I like reading well-written writing.

I like reading interesting and well-written writing.

I enjoy helping people create interesting and well-written writing. I enjoyed doing that as a professional engineer, but it was only an occasional occurrence during my typical working week.

Perhaps copy-editing and proofreading could become part of the new career that I hadn’t previously known that I was looking for?

It has.

One of the first engagements of my post-engineering career was for Juan David Polanco of iNovoTech, helping him with a 10,000-word industry report he was preparing for a client. Big report, but I enjoyed reading it, and probably took longer than needed to copy-edit and proofread it because I found the subject matter interesting.

If you want you want your writing to be taken to the next level in terms of quality, sense, impression and style, get in touch with me.

If it’s interesting, that would just be a bonus.

Images: depositphotos