Editing and proofreading
Not everything we do at Wrightwell is about writing from scratch. Sometimes we work with professionals who have written their own content, and simply need a sanity check on the flow and accuracy of their writing.
Case 1: Book editing for style and structure
Case 1: Book editing for style and structure
The challenge
Our expert client Adrian Rasdall had written a chapter for a design book, “The Journey” and needed an editor and proofreader to cast a professional eye over the copy.
The criteria
Editing book content is quite different to editing marketing copy. We wanted to maintain the character of the writing, while checking for clarity of language, logical structure and completeness.
Our approach
With our experience in book and journal publishing, we know that every publisher has a house style guide. We asked for the guide, and some background on how the whole book would work together as a series of chapters from different professional authors.
We read through the copy carefully, marking up a word document with suggested changes, and adding comments to explain our suggestions at every stage.
At the same time we ensured that spelling, grammar and punctuation are correct and conform to house style.
As requested by the author, we suggested changes to order of content to ensure a good flow of the argument.
Finally, we checked the references.
Case 2: Bringing technical content and marketing strategy together
The challenge
We needed to find a way to work with consultants who had already written their technical papers to bring a more accessible, marketing-oriented focus to their content.
The criteria
No criteria. Just “work some of your magic on these”. This was good enough in this case because we had been working on the content of all the company’s marketing collateral for some time, in the role of writer and adviser.
Our approach
With a knowledge of the company’s business and experience of working with its marketing department on other projects, we worked through the papers with the primary aim of making them more accessible.
We employed the tools we know – such as varying sentence length, changing passive verbs to active, talking directly to the audience with “we” and “you”.
We then met with each of the consultants to go through suggested changes and explain our reasoning behind the changes. This required some tact, especially as the process had not been explained fully by the marketing department.
Once changes had been agreed in essence we made our final changes and sent the documents to a satisfied marketing manager.
