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By Sara Brady About one of every five books sold in the United States is a romance novel, and annual sales for the genre add up to more than a billion dollars, not even counting those that are self-published. That’s a lot of books—and they all need copy editors. I’ve been reading romance novels for…

By Pam Hogle As a copy editor, you wouldn’t dream of publishing content without fact-checking it or ensuring it conforms to your publication’s style. But what good is accurate, balanced content if a significant proportion of your audience cannot access it? As many as one in five Americans lives with a disability; many more struggle…

By James Harbeck English spelling is, obviously, a mess. We’ve taken words from just about every place and time you can think of. But so have some other, less messy, languages! An extra factor in English is that we can’t agree on what the point of spelling is. I don’t mean “Why spell at all?”…

By Madalena Sánchez Zampaulo The sign of a great translation is one that does not appear to be a translation, i.e., it reads as though it were originally written in the reader’s primary language. This is why, although many stellar translators can translate into their non-native language, the industry standard tends to be that professional…

By Christine Ma Have you ever been in the middle of reading a novel or a short story, when you happen upon a mistake about something you’re familiar with and get so annoyed that you don’t even want to finish the book? Copy editors, who are among the last to review a manuscript before it…

By Emmy Favilla Language has the incredible ability to shape social construct; there’s been evidence that the words we choose to use may, in fact, influence our perception of reality. And so, while we, as individuals, may not harness the capacity to entirely eliminate instances of discrimination, exclusion and disrespect across the globe, we do…

By Jake Poinier I have no hard-and-fast rules about pricing freelance jobs, other than trying to figure out what the client wants. In my experience, most clients prefer project pricing to hourly rates, assuming the same overall cost. At the same time, there are subtleties in how you convey a project estimate that can make…