Editors do a lot more than catch errors. They tighten your text and make it more effective in conveying your message to your audience. A text that hasn’t been professionally edited can often be spotted as easily as fridge art can be distinguished from gallery art. But what really stands out is when lack of an editorial eye costs you money – and reputation.
It doesn’t matter who you are and what your responsibilities include:
- You might be a government agency on the hook for thousands of dollars to reprint a form or a promotional piece that had obvious spelling errors in it (possibly including the perennial gaffe pubic for public) – or to remake a bronze plaque that misspells a historical figure’s name.
- You could be a large company hit with a multimillion-dollar judgment for back pay owing due to a missing comma in a standard contract.
- You may be a website who, trying to be hip, tweeted a topical reference that was actually breathtakingly insensitive… and went viral, as the saying goes.
- Or perhaps you’re an educational publisher who inadvertently included a very rude word from another language in a school text, or a cookbook publisher who let a recipe go to print with a typo that turned a simple ingredient into a racial slur. Either way, you have to recall the whole run, pulp and reprint, and do major damage control in the media.
All of these have happened in real life, some of them several times. A good editor could have prevented all of them and saved many times the editing fee. In fact, good editors do prevent things like this many times a day. You don’t hear about it because the mistakes were caught in time.
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