I am frequently irritated by Web content that is poorly edited. How often have you seen Web sites where “your” and “you’re” have been confused or you see a phrase like “enter you name”?
It’s a fact; the general level of online abuse of the English language is high and getting higher. In particular, blog postings, which are often “off the cuff” articles, frequently have terrible grammar and incomplete sentences. You have to wonder whether the authors ever do any kind of proofreading of their own work and, more critically, whether they care if their content makes sense and or looks professional.
The same critique applies to many other types of business documents such as newsletters, press releases, white papers, and product documentation.
It would be hard to believe that so many businesses just simply don’t care about the quality of their published content therefore the problem has to be that finding an editor who can deliver a short turnaround and provide quality editing all for a reasonable price is the real challenge.
Fulfilling that need is the goal of a handful of online services and a new entrant, EditZen, launched in May this year, offers the lowest cost service I’ve seen so far, just $3.95 per page (a page is defined by EditZen as 300 words which is the usual approximate word count per page for a trade paperback).
EditZen will accept your document in MS Word 2000, MS Word 2003, and MS Word 2007 formats and commits to a 24-hour turnaround with a 100% satisfaction guarantee. Payment is only accepted via PayPal.
The secret sauce in the EditZen service is crowdsourcing: The company has a large roster of editors to whom they farm out proofing jobs through their Web-based job management system.
EditZen emphasizes their use of humans rather than algorithmic approaches arguing, quite rightly, that machine editing is simply not up to the task. Yet.
There are a couple of things about EditZen that are concerns. First security of documents to be edited is an issue. EditZen claims “Your documents may only be viewed by credentialed editors and reviewers. All EditZen editors and reviewers sign an agreement that prohibits them from using the information in your documents for any purpose other than editing and proofreading your work.” That’s good but if I was to use the service for anything truly confidential I’d want something more than a simple blanket statement.
Another concern is that this is a generalized editing service so documents that are very technical or involve complex arguments may not get an optimal level of proofing.
Those issues aside, for everyday documents and Web content, having an expert human take a serious look at grammar, syntax, and all of the other areas where editing is so often missing can stop your organization from looking amateurish and naïve. Moreover, at just under one and half cents per word, that’s a very affordable form of brand integrity insurance.
