WHY HIRE AN EDITOR?

By Beverly Hanly

Every writer needs an editor. Even novelists like Hemingway and Faulkner had editors before their words ever reached their public. A good editor makes a writer shine, finding and supporting the writer's own voice and trimming away the excess that might obscure the all important content.

As a writer (and you're probably a good one) you can edit, but you're using a very different part of your brain when you edit than when you're writing. The writer draws on the wellspring of creativity -- it's the artist at work. The editor is analytical, critical -- that's the editor's job -- and it's literally a different part of the brain that kicks in when the editor is working. That's why if the inner editor starts working too soon, you can bog down before you get it all out. Once you engage the analytical brain, you stop the flow. When you fuss with exactly how you should say something, you can easily lose the brilliant train of thought you started with.

That inner editor has a bias too: you love certain passages of your words and you're not about to cut those. An external editor will prune extraneous material (no matter how dear) to shape a concise, clear piece of writing that achieves its objective for the audience you want to reach.

If you're not writing, maybe you've asked the best technical expert in your company to craft a whitepaper extolling the benefits of your product and describing its workings. Who could know better what your business can do? But the paper is intended for managers or execs you'd like to buy the product. Does the writing hook that audience? Is that upper-level manager with buying power to provision his IT team so intrigued he reads right through until he arrives at his train station? Does he get off the train, thinking "I need to make that call, tell Frank to line up a meeting with [your company name]." Or do his eyes glaze over and stray to the sports page lying on the seat next to him?

A good editor can bring strong, dense content into a form that speaks to your target audience.

A good editor fulfills these functions so a marketing piece or a technical document succeeds:

• Becomes a real audience. You know what you mean and your words are steeped in the superiority of your product or company. Your editor sees the copy cold, as it will be perceived by the public. This is your chance to clear up confusing passages, contradictory statements, in-house jargon (anything that keeps the words from communicating the strengths of your product to somebody else) before it goes public.
• Finds appropriate voice and style. The editor helps a unique voice emerge but cleans up the prose so it sings.
• Handles the writer's ego. Writers are sensitive about being edited, so when an editor points out the writer's strengths early in the process and subtly reinforces those in later edits she keeps the writer from becoming defensive.
• Clarifies intent. Maybe you haven't even thought who your audience is. For instance, you might be trying to impress other SMEs with the strength of your application. Or you might be trying to convince that all important exec that your product is exactly what's needed to make his business competitive and secure in today's marketplace. The same content for those two audiences would be cast very differently.
• Provides consistency. Enough said.
• Organizes your prose. When your content flows logically, a busy person gets it quickly and is so impressed he has to take action.

So whether you are writing your own copy or hiring a writer, it makes sense to hire an editor separately -- you get higher quality work delivered in less time. If the writer has to write, edit, copyedit and proofread, it will never be as good as when the writer writes, hands off the piece to the editor and picks up the next writing project immediately. You have better flow and better quality, and it doesn't cost any more than if you had a writer do it all.

You would never release a product until you had put it through rigorous rounds of QA and user testing. A piece of marketing collateral, a training document or a user manual -- these are products put out by your company. Invest in their quality and the benefits of your attention to detail will pay off in satisfied customers who want to buy.

To make your marketing and documentation efforts really shine, hire an editor who can work well with your writers. A good one will bring out the best in each writer, apply a consistency of style to all company documents and streamline the copy so your target audience really gets the point.

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Beverly Hanly has worked as managing editor, copy chief, content editor and copy editor for a number of Bay Area publications. With 20 years' experience editing books, magazines, multimedia publications and corporate communications, she has taught writing and editing at Media Alliance and Editcetera, as well as university composition classes.