Freelancers offer a number of editing services. A freelance editing service may come in the form of basic proofreading, fact checking or a combination of both.
Basic proofreading is a freelance editing service where the freelance editor reads your manuscript or draft article thoroughly and checks for any spelling, grammatical or punctuation mistakes. This is the kind of service companies normally ask for, as they prepare press releases or website content.
Fact checking is where the editor does another check to see that the data you include in your article, such as dates, places and events are historically and geographically correct. This kind of freelance editing service is typically requested by students, professionals writing for a journal or famous people writing an opinion piece for either online or offline publication.
Further freelance editing service offers supervision in style, consistency and flow. In the process of writing, an author may become affected by what he reads or watches and thus changes his style or diction. This may confuse readers and an editor is responsible in ensuring that this does not happen.
Some authors also move too fast in some places and then slow down considerably in other places; some provide the tiniest details to one topic while completely ignore other topics.
Some drafts call for more work, where an editor may offer a freelance editing service called line editing. Inexperience or unfamiliarity with required style may cause an author to excessively use a certain sentence structure that is not exactly recommended for the targeted audience. In such cases, the editor needs to do editing and perhaps even rewriting on sentence-per-sentence level.
Line editing also takes care of overall readability, flow and structure. Authors sometimes don’t notice that the use of pronouns is not necessarily clear to the readers. This is again, where the editor comes in. Sometimes each paragraph is already fluent, only the sequence needs adjustment; or between paragraphs there is no clear bridge and they seem to be slapped up together just to follow the word count guideline.
Freelance editing services address this problem and ensure that the client’s writing is ready for submission or publication.