Can anyone recommend a proofreading service? I’ve got an autoresponder series of e-mails set up for new users, but I don’t want to send them out until someone has looked over them. Any recommendations?
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I’ve never used a service, just find That Friend. You know, the one with Eats, Shoots & Leaves on their bookcase. Then blackmail them with “you wouldn’t want me to send this out would you?”
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I haven’t tried it myself, but you could take a look at Wordy.com, which is an online proofreading service. There are probably several other similar services.
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I’ve worked my personal network a bit. A Facebook post was enough to put me in touch with somebody. We’ll see if it works out. Wordy may be worth trying, Jacob, thanks.
My wife is a former newspaper copyeditor and could help you. Get in touch! I’m at holovaty.com/contact.
My wife does my proof reading for me (thanks Claire!). But even she couldn’t face 200 pages of help documentation, so I found someone on elance for that.
I’d suggest that you check http://www.proofreadingpal.com
They have two editors that look at your text, you have per word pricing (with a minimum fee of about 30$) and you can choose the turnaround that you want (from 5 days to 90 minutes).
I haven’t used a paid-service yet (mostly my sis-in-law and trade her for drinks when she’s in town).
What I have found to be effective is reading what I’ve written aloud. Read it slowly, and with feeling. You’ll quickly find those awkward sentences or missing words.
There are lots of proofreading services on fiverr.
Off topic (kinda) but I love that you know what “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” is. Hilarious book and great indicator of proof reading power. From reading the book I realized that I love the Oxford comma.
Well, can’t say the services mentioned on this page are totally satisfiable for, say, a blog.
What I would like to have is:
- I publish a new blog entry
- I send the link to the service
- After some time I get the list of corrections back and update my post
I do not want to make a Word document out of my WordPress post and send it out. That’s an extra step.
Ideally, I should be able to share the draft of the post or page with the editor, but this is a nice to have feature.
Anyone aware of service like that?
You just came up with a good business idea.
The only question is: Do enough bloggers actually pay for proofreading to make this practical?
I cannot know if it is good, but I’d like to have a Wordpress plugin from where I could submit my new posts and pages to the proofreading service in one click. Reply by email with corrections would be enough.
And it does exist! (Found via Google)
Oh wait, this is some automatic crap. I need live humans.
Here it is, Wordy plugin. Will try it on weekend.
My update: I was very happy hiring someone who I found through working my personal network. She is a part-time journalist and has some experience relevant to my business, which makes a very good fit.
And… tried it. The Wordy service itself is very good. The page I made in Wordpress was edited within a couple of hours, and edits are intuitively good (I have to remind again that I’m not a native English speaker).
The downside though is that some of the custom HTML markup I had on that page is gone. I believe this is not a Wordy plugin issue, but a general issue with proofreading: they need a plain text to pass through their systems, and it means markup is damaged no matter what. (Simply markup, like p’s and h2’s went through undamaged, but div’s got lost).
So I’m going to stick with Wordy for now, but not with Wordy plugin.
I’m going to copy the page text into a Word document, upload it, then review the made changes in the Word’s changes tracking view, and migrate the changes done into my pages manually. It is more work, but I cannot afford to lose the markup every time I add a section to a page and proofread it.
Oh mein gott!
I’ve just got a couple of my latest post from the proofreading at Wordy. I knew I make a lot of mistakes, but I never realized just HOW MANY.
For any non-English speaker who has to write English texts – the proofreading is a must-have.
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