Freelance editing services are not limited to basic proofreading or fact checking alone. They cover all kind of services a writer may seek in order to polish her article, essay or manuscript.
Proofreading
This is normally the most sought for editing service most writers look for. An author may have excellent grasp of English but nobody is immune to typos, punctuation doubts or homonym slips. Standard word processors can usually help with spelling mistakes and punctuations but only human editor can really spot errors based on context and other factors a machine can not distinguish.
Fact Checking
Journalistic or opinion pieces, academic papers and even fiction manuscript based their content, completely or partially, on facts. Some authors are meticulous about this; they even enjoy the process of acquiring said facts, confirming and rechecking same. Some other authors thoroughly loathe it and prefer to hand over the task to someone else. They can employ professional researcher to dig the facts and then use freelance editing services to confirm and check that their writing matches confirmed data.
Copy Editing
This editing service combines basic proofreading and style supervision. Publication through different media follows different types of guideline and it is one of the assistance offered by freelance editing services – to see that a client’s submission fall in line of these rules.
Line Editing
Line editing involves in-depth editing assistance due to low quality of writing. This may be caused by lack of experience or ignorance toward intended readers. The amount of work is considerably more as the freelance editing services comprise going sentence after sentence working on readability, flow and organization of ideas.
Author may be fluent in getting her ideas across but not so good at putting them together in a coherent sequence; or author finds it difficult to deliver the message in short, effective sentences; or the author can deliver the messages effectively while the paragraphs are in sequence but there is no visible link between paragraphs, leaving the article to feel as if it is a product of copy pasting from various sources.
In fiction work, freelance editing services also help with consistency check concerning timeline, events, characters background, actions, traits and preferences.