I recently made posts on Instagram and Twitter asking the writing community a question that is pretty important to me: if they hadn’t used or didn’t plan to use a professional editor, what was their reasoning? I got a lot of responses, which was awesome, and incredibly enlightening. I had (somewhat naïvely, it transpires) assumed … Read More
Emma O’Connell graduated with a First Class Degree in English Literature and Italian Language; she has been editing professionally since 2016, and informally long before then. She has worked on a wide variety of media and genres, from her husband’s PhD thesis in High Performance Computing to children’s picture books, but her first love is … Read More
You might have heard the term ‘book outline’ tossed around when it comes to writing, editing, and publishing a manuscript – so what is it and where do you get one from? The answer is what it says on the tin. A book outline is a simple breakdown of your book. It outlines all the … Read More
As you’ve probably just discovered, a search for ‘copy-editing vs. proofreading’ brings up hundreds of different results, from ‘line editing’ to ‘proofreading’, and words such as ‘developmental’, ‘opinionated’ and ‘beta reading’ get thrown around, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and confused. If you’re unsure where to start with getting your manuscript edited, it’s worth understanding … Read More
I have found that some forms of punctuation appear to be an unfathomable mystery to a lot of people, and for some reason, semicolons are the worst offender. I have seen comments on Reddit along the lines of ‘I have no idea how to use semicolons so I generally just stick one in a sentence … Read More
You’ve finally finished that novel or short story collection. It’s taken you months… maybe even years! Hooray! …WHAT NOW? Before you consider professional editing and publication, it’s always worth going over your work at least once. It can be tempting to just hand your work over to someone else, and self-editing often feels like the … Read More
