Business editing - 4 situations where it can help your company
In today's world, where so much business is conducted digitally, you're often judged on the quality of your written work. Whether you're writing an internal email or a client proposal, you want to make sure your writing is as clear and polished as possible. One way to do so is to send your work to a professional business editing service to review and improve your draft.
Almost anyone can benefit from an external review of their writing; however, there are four particular situations when it makes sense to enlist the help of an outside editor:
1. Multiple authors
When several different people have been involved in writing a document, it often shows. If your draft has been written by committee, it's likely to contain different writing styles as well as different approaches to grammar and punctuation.
This often happens when various team members have been responsible for the different sections of a document, for example, or where the content has undergone several rounds of revision.
In these situations, an outside editor can help to ensure that your writing has a consistent tone and voice and that your reader won't be distracted by different writing styles.
2. English as a second language
A particular challenge for businesses in the Asia Pacific region is that many employees are not native English speakers, but are still required to write in English.
Whether you are communicating with global teams, or dealing with clients whose first language is English, it can be challenging to put your message across clearly the first time.
If you're nervous about your written English, then using an outside editor can not only help to improve your document, but can also flag up areas to watch out for in the future. Before long, your confidence will improve too!
3. A small team
Often, Western or multinational companies in Hong Kong simply don't have the capacity or expertise in their teams to ensure that every English document is word perfect.
Staff members are recruited for the particular skills they bring to a role, and written English isn't always at the top of that list. If this sounds familiar, you don't necessarily need to recruit an in-house editor—simply use an external editing service to polish your documents and free up your team's time to do what they do best—grow your business.
4. An independent view
Should you use American or British English? Which punctuation does your company favour? Do you describe your company in a different way to colleagues? If there is no consistency within your organisation, it can be hard to know the best approach to take. Yet it might be that neither you nor your colleagues are actually right or wrong; you simply use different styles and grammar.
If this is the case, an outside editor can provide an independent perspective—ensuring that your work is in line with your company's style guide, if you have one, or that it matches previous documents. An external viewpoint can resolve a lot of arguments.
Whether you find yourself facing one of these situations or several of them, it's likely that your company's documents aren't always as polished as they could be. If you want to keep costs down, but also produce work that does your business justice, then you might just benefit from some outside help.
If you need some editing advice, contact us now to find out more about our editing services.