Editing Services: Thoughts on Reedsy
Over the course of my career as a copyeditor and proofreader, I have worked for a variety of editing platforms that specialize in connecting clients with editors. Working for many of these companies was a good experience and improved my skillset and confidence as an early editor. Other companies were less worthwhile, and ultimately I…
The Editing Services Toolkit: Tracked Changes
Those of us who provide book editing services are of course very familiar with Word’s Tracked Changes, but it is a feature those who do not work in editing or proofreading are frequently unfamiliar with. To put it simply, Track Changes does exactly what its title suggests: It keeps track of any changes made in…
Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition
For those of us who work as editors or writers in the environment of much US publishing, the largest editorial shift in recent months has been the release of the eighteenth edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. The changes between editions of CMoS are not, as a general rule, monumental, but rather incremental, and…
The Pros and Cons of Freelance Editing
This January marked the anniversary of my beginning a career in freelance editing. When I first started, it was part time as a way of earning some money from home in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic while I was finishing my Master’s degree. Around June of last year, I transitioned to full-time editing work,…
Using “As” to Mean “Because”
There is a strange prejudice that I have encountered a number of times in the editorial world, namely the belief that one cannot use the word “as” in a causative sense, to mean “because.” Multiple people have tried to tell me that “as” has only a temporal significance and cannot be used in any other…
The Importance of Making an Outline
When editing for students, I am regularly asked to provide input on the structure and clarity of a given paper. Often, the author has a clear idea of how the argument is meant to progress, the major points along the way, and how each point contributes to the conclusion. Other times, however, the paper is…
Ben Woollard 