How to Find an Editor: Looking for Right Editor Tips from Essay-Editor

Things to Consider Looking for an Editor

How to recognize good editors

It is a pretty challenging task to find a good editor. However, it is not impossible. The problem is that everyone has his / her own needs and demands. That is why there is no solution that will fit perfectly absolutely everyone. Nevertheless, we want to share some information about how to choose an editor, and to what points it is necessary to pay attention to be sure that your choice is right.

First and foremost, you need to evaluate professional skills, in particular how well a specialist possesses basic tools. Now we want to present a list of warning signals: if at least two or three of them are present, most likely, it means that you should not cooperate with the person and keep on looking.

Too long and extensive presentation of oneself – when you look for a specialist, you usually ask him / her to tell something about him(her)self to get acquainted. If a potential specialist starts speaking too much, it usually demonstrates an excessive and unordered flow of thought. Most likely, you will not get a good-quality result.
Presenting oneself, a specialist does not use references properly. It means that he / she does not know how to use them. This is another sign of the lack of competence.
Telling about oneself looks like a set of statements copied from other specialists. You can always notice when a person uses others’ thoughts and tries to present them as one’s own.
Improper tone (fraternizing or passive-aggressive). It is better to avoid communication with such a person at all.
If a person passes the test of telling about oneself, the next step is to look at his / her work.
A text does not have a title and subtitles, paragraphs are too big or too short. An author knows nothing about text hygiene, contrast principle and basics of attention control.
There are rhetorical questions in the beginning of a text. It means that a writer does not know how to draw attention.
It is not clear what a text is about from the first sentences.
If a person does not possess elementary basics of text hygiene and attention control, there is nothing much to say – this person still needs much to learn. It does not mean that a person is bad, it just means that he / she does not know the basics of work yet.

The point is that all this is technical skills. A person can know nothing about the world around, write absolute nonsense and use perfectly professional tools at the same time. That is why it is extremely important to evaluate content: about what and how a person writes, whether you believe him / her or not, whether there are live details in a text or not. There is no specific list according to which you can check it – just rely on your feeling.

So you have a text. You are ready to present it. Well, almost ready. There is one step more – an editor is necessary. Where to find a good one?

Save your text with professional editing

An editor will cut a text or add additional material, organize its composition, point at the inaccuracies, fix the mistakes, polish style, and do a lot of other things to improve a text. Sometimes an editor can write even more than a text author. An experienced editor will save author’s writing, especially when author is desperate and does not know how to finish the work on a text. It means that a writer is not alone. You will never be alone because our editors are always there for you.

Yes, not only an author deals with a text. The way from a draft to a completed paper is teamwork. It is impossible to avoid cooperation with an editor on this way. There are no solo texts. The epoch of “loners” became a matter of history.

How to find a good editor? Here are several tips

Good editor, who are you?

In many cases “good” means experienced, perfectly literate and able to tell about one’s editing services with passion. This kind of person will edit and keep polishing someone else’s text as if it is his / her own.
“Good” means harsh enough, pedantic and uncompromising when it goes about the issues of language purity.
A good editor also does not smoke and does not abuse alcohol because these bad habits “litter” brain a lot and interfere with work.
“Good” means that a specialist has an excellent memory. Otherwise, an editor will not manage to follow the content of a text.
A good specialist criticizes carefully – he / she notices not only mistakes and flaws but also the strengths of an author.
A good one knows how to work with different clients, with the beginners, as well as those who write texts professionally for a long time.

The owners of the websites (really professional high-quality websites) know a simple truth: it is really hard, almost impossible, to find an editor who magically turns a text into a miracle. Even big editorial offices cannot boast of having good editors.

One of the most obvious reasons is the lack of professionals. The quality of books is decreasing annually. Mass media demonstrates awful illiteracy, and sometimes you just wonder how such a text full of mistakes and factual inaccuracies could be published and presented to readers.

A suitable editor for a writer is two in one: a qualified editor and a writer of one’s own novels or short-stories. Yes, it is better when an editor also writes books. Such a specialist will read and fix one’s writing as if it is his / her own. Also, editor’s books serve as a sample of his / her work.

The examples of editors-writers are presented among the most outstanding literary personalities. If we speak about fiction, it is Clifford Simak. He was occupied with editing and writing for several decades simultaneously. In 1967, he got the award from Academy of Science of Minnesota for his editing work.

Where and how to find a good editor?

Way #1: to ask your friends and familiars who can advise you someone. This method does not work always because information about a good editor is often hidden, and many authors prefer not to share it.

Way #2: to risk and without someone’s recommendations to look for an editor on the web. The most frequent requests are “editing services”, “text editing”, “correct my writing”, and so on. Your search engine will help and guide you. However, it is necessary to look for a specialist without haste. Haste would make waste. If a person does not have time to look for an editor properly, he / she will hardly succeed eventually.

Way #3: to appeal to the professional editors of Essay-editor com.

The final way – exclusive. Improve your own writing skills, become a professional as Simak, and be your own editor. Be your own good editor! This way is unbelievable.

Can a beginning writer do without an editor?

Hardly… The services of a text editor are obligatory for both beginners and mature writers. Poor knowledge of language and poor vocabulary of many modern writers lead to obvious conclusions: without an editor one’s writing will never be good. We know it for sure because the specialists of our company have already edited thousands of papers, articles, even novels and philosophical tracts.

The one who does not want to be embarrassed in front of readers appeals to an editor. Of course, it is important to cooperate with a good editor. You will find the best ones on our website.

What types of editors exist?

It is important to know what types of editors exist to understand whom to look for, what requirements you can set, and how to evaluate and control the quality of work.

A literary editor – is a person who is able to evaluate the texts in general, to notice mistakes in meaning, to remove stylistic mistakes, to work with the facts and content of texts. In this case, it is advised to look for the candidates with a university degree who have a wealth of experience in editing.
An editor-proofreader – this is your specialist if the main object is to fix grammatical mistakes, typos and misprints. In this case, you need to look for a person with a university degree in philology or editing. You can cooperate with a senior student. However, if you need a serious specialist, a perfect option is a person with experience of correction work at an editing office.
An editor-writer – this person writes a text and detects mistakes all by him(her)self. On the one hand, it is very convenient when there is such a specialist, on the other hand, when writing a text, an editor loses the “sharpness of eye”, and that is why another editor will be wanted.
An editor-expert in a particular field – this person may have no relation to language and linguistics, but he / she is perfectly aware of a specific subject that one’s text is dedicated to. Such an expert will detect every tiny factual mistake. For such a specialist, work experience in a particular field, about which a text tells, is essential, for example: tourism, medicine, agriculture, etc.
An editor-organizer – this is a person who organizes copywriters, monitors their work on projects, and perfectly knows what is going on with them at every stage. Also, this specialist edits texts. If you need such an expert, you are looking for a rare professional – a philologist with experience in project management.
A conditional editor – this is a specialist who checks whether a written text meets all the set requirements: uniqueness, clarity, logic, key points, etc. Experience and education are not much significant for this profession, personal features are more important. You need to look for a true phlegmatic that is able to deal with the same occupation for a long time. Anyone will do in this case: a student, a pensioner, a neighbor, a person just needs to understand the objectives clearly and perform the job calmly and systematically.
An editor-teacher – this is a specialist who works at a company and pays special attention to its copywriters. In other words, he / she explains how to work with the text to minimize the number of correction, points at typical mistakes of copywriters that are better to get rid of for good, and so on.

Whom to hire?

If you just need to check language literacy, it is better to choose an editor-proofreader. Prefer a literary editor if meaning, logic and correctness of facts are above all. An editor-teacher and an editor-organizer are wanted at the stage of creation of content. A conditional editor will cope with a task if he / she is a hard worker, attentive to details, and uses special services to check content. An editor-expert is wanted for the projects with complex subjects: medicine, law, technical subjects, etc.

Where to look for an editor?

The list of sources for where to find an editor is quite obvious:

Exchange / markets;
Recommendations;
Job websites;
Social networks;
Content studios;
Thematic forums.

How to understand if your editor is good?

The question is pretty difficult because, in fact, you need to evaluate work of a person who knows it better than you, and here we face two risks: to think something bad about a good specialist or to trust to a not very good one.

Editors are also mistaken and cannot work restlessly. However, everything is within limits. If your editor-proofreader misses one not much serious mistakes per 2000 signs, this is the reason for serious thinking about his / her competence. If he / she misses one and the same mistake, this is another food for thought.

For a literary editor and a proofreader, a standard pace of work is about 50 thousand of signs per a full working day. If an editor works less, the problem is either about him / her or about the texts: maybe there are too much to fix or the work process even looks like rewriting.

For editors who need to check the facts, uniqueness, key points and other parameters, the pace of work is much lower, of course.

If you have doubts about the quality of work of an editor, only another specialist with appropriate skills can prove or disprove them.

Calculate Your Price

275 words

Total Price: $0