“The excellence of an editor is in making people never notice the editing. Hence, the greatest editors go unnoticed.” — YumDude
Everyone can benefit from hiring a proofreader to review their content before it’s published. It may seem like an unnecessary expense, but a good proofreader is an invaluable resource in your writing arsenal. Here are 3 reasons why you should hire a proofreader for your next writing project.
- Polished, error-free content upholds your credibility with your readers. If you want to be known as an authority in your niche, publishing content that’s riddled with errors will eventually cause your readers to question the validity of your content. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Let’s pretend that you are reading an ebook that explains the steps to become a grant writing unicorn. Grant writing is serious business! If that ebook contained multiple spelling and grammatical errors, would you trust what the author was saying? Probably not. Hiring a proofreader is worth the expense to ensure that you are publishing the high-quality content that your readers expect and deserve.
- Proofreaders know their craft. A proofreader is not only trained to edit and make corrections and suggestions to your writing, they are also highly skilled in explaining those corrections and suggestions when providing feedback. Perhaps you struggle with homophones or correctly using pronouns such as me, myself, and I. A proofreader’s feedback will help you become a better writer over time as you’ll be learning from your mistakes.
- Proofreaders bring a fresh set of eyes to your content. Reading your content multiple times can cause your eyes to gloss over grammatical errors and misspellings. Reading the same thing over and over trains your eyes (and your brain) on what the content “should” say. As a result, your eyes will begin to automatically correct any errors that might be present so as not to interrupt the flow of your reading. This happens to the best of writers, so please don’t feel embarrassed! When you’ve been staring at your content for hours on end, you lose objectivity. Having a fresh set of eyes review your work brings that objectivity back into play, ensuring your writing is polished and error-free.
And there you have it! Three solid reason reasons for hiring a proofreader. Hiring a proofreader doesn’t mean that you’re a bad writer. On the contrary, it means that you’re a smart writer!
As a proofreader and editor, my goal is to help you publish high-quality and error-free content for your readers. Let’s work together on your next writing project! Contact me for next steps.