If you’ve read my About page, you’ll know that my background is in editing… mostly. That’s not to say I’ve abandoned it — far from it. Copyediting, in my experience, takes someone with a good editorial eye.

What you get, when you bring a copywriter into your life, isn’t just a good writer. Sure, you want someone who can get your message across. Someone who can (apparently easily) convey what you sometimes struggle to convey. But the real gold lies in knowing that your writer can rework what you may have already begun.

And, let’s be honest: Editing is a mysterious, dark underworld.

The popular perception of an editor is of a hunched-over spinster, with grey hair in a tight bun. A hard woman who is bitter at not being able to teach kids how to use their grammar properly. Or know when to use an apostrophe. Someone who spends her life buried under piles of books and manuscripts, and somehow makes them readable.

Like a witch, really.

That ain’t the case. Do I look like one of these?

Me flying a kite earlier in the year

Many of my clients already have material they want to use. Sure, I often take notes, ideas, and what-have-you, and whiz them up into great copy. But it is perhaps more often the case that I provide editorial feedback, and rework what people already have.

A good example is this article. It is part of a series of articles (the remainder yet to be posted) about using social networks. But it didn’t begin that way.

How it began was an idea about ‘growing your networks’ — combining both Twitter and Facebook. It sounds simple and easy, but as a blog article it isn’t.

What I determined, once I took my critical eye out of its box and cast it over the project, was that it was actually three parts. The first on using Facebook pages. And the second and third on growing social networks: one network at a time.

Similarly, the most recent site I worked on came out of a previous incarnation of that site, plus a brief A4 promotional blurb.

Tons of copywriters will go ‘duh’, sure that’s the job. I would argue that unless your copywriter has a critical eye for structure, you probably aren’t getting the most out of him or her. And that’s where editing comes in.

Good editors don’t just use your content and make it pretty. Unless you’ve instructed otherwise, your editor will suggest ways of tightening your text’s structure to give it a healthier glow.

You can polish a rough stone and make it look prettier. Or you can shape it and turn it into something really beautiful. That is the difference.

A person who works with you to write your content — regardless of format or style — will know this. If your copywriter doesn’t take a structural initiative sometimes, it’s worthwhile wondering why. Because they should.

Tags: copywriting, editing
Filed under: About Copywriting