10 Things an Editing Service Needs to Know to Provide the Best Copyediting Possible

If you’ve never used an editing service before, you may not know what to expect or how to get the best results from the service that Edit 911 provides. All the editors at Edit 911 are highly skilled professionals who have earned PhD degrees and have years of experience helping clients improve their writing to yield the best possible outcome. Many of us are currently writers ourselves, with an active publication schedule, so we are quite familiar with the production of quality documents, including the importance of attention to detail. We know what we’re doing, and we want to help you produce a final product that proves that you too know what you are doing!

When you make a submission to Edit 911, you will be assigned a specific editor. For the relationship between an author and an editor to be truly productive, a great deal more information is needed. The list below details the information needed in order to make your working relationship with your editor much more successful.

1. Who or what is this document for? A school assignment? Completion of a degree (if so, what degree and what university)? For publication in a journal? For publication by a commercial publisher? For self-publication? For a professional newsletter? In any of those cases, please describe your readership in some detail, so that your editor can judge how well the text and the expected readership “match.”

2. If your document is for publication, where do you plan to publish it so that we can try to locate the publisher’s or journal’s style guide? Have you been assigned to use a specific style guide? If so, please provide the name of the guide and the edition—for example, APA 11^th edition, or Chicago Manual of Style 16^th edition.

3. Do you prefer American spelling and punctuation or British/Australian/New Zealand/Canadian spelling and punctuation?

4. What is the earliest reasonable deadline by which you need your work to be edited and returned to you? If there are significant problems with your manuscript, are you willing to submit it for a second round of editing after you have made all indicated corrections?

5. Are you using an electronic data base for your academic references? If so, please provide the name of the data base and the edition—for example, EndNote 5.

6. Does your manuscript need a formal Table of Contents? If so, please provide the name of the software or word processing program that was used to create your document. Give as much detail as possible.

7. Does your document contain pictures, diagrams, tables, charts, or graphs? If so, what program were they created in? Do those need to be edited? Did you check these pictures, diagrams, tables, charts, or graphs against any required style guide?

8. Are foreign words used regularly in your document? If so, please provide the name of the language/s used, and if possible, provide a link to an on-line dictionary of that language so that we can check your spelling and usage.

9. Are technical or unusual words used in your document? If possible, provide a link to an on-line dictionary for those words so that we can check your spelling and usage.

10. Is there anything else you would like to say to your editor in order to insure that you get the best possible service from him or her?