Editing
Good editing is about making your words and voice better and stronger. I love to find my way inside a writer’s style, and enhance the work without altering the artistic vision. With over a decade of experience and affordable rates, you can count on me to deliver crisp, clean, speedy results that won’t break the bank.
Want to hire me?
I offer free consultations, so please don’t hesitate to reach out. Email me, rita@ritaoconnell.com, with a description of what you’re working on and what you need.
Here’s a quick rundown of types of editing, each of which have their own rate scale. (If the answer is “all of the below,” that’s perfectly fine!)
Developmental editing is the big-picture view. I’ll look at your whole piece of content — paper, grant, story, you name it — to help you improve things like structure, pace, and tone, and suggest rewrites and new approaches to solve creative issues. Developmental editing is really an artistic conversation between the editor and the writer, to the tune of are you saying what you want to say, in the manner in which you intend to say it?
Copyediting focuses on writing at the technical level. As a copyeditor, I’ll correct your spelling, grammar, punctuation, and usage; ensure consistency in your language; and check your facts. This is the nitpicky rules-of-grammar stuff — which I happen to really, really love. So agonize no more over whether you should be using an m-dash or an n-dash, how many commas you need, or whether semicolons are a valid form of punctuation (spoiler: yes), and let me take it from here.
Proofreading is the final step before a work is released into the world; one last pass to ensure that all the typos have been removed, the style sheet was followed, the page numbers are accurate, that sort of thing. Proofreading often focuses on super small things you may never even notice, like widows and orphans, extra spaces, and weird formatting accidents. This is the ultimate polish — the final coat of paint that makes the whole thing shine.
I always perform a complimentary sample edit before drawing up a contract, so that we can both be sure our styles jive. Reach out today and we’ll see where we can go together.