Challenge

Turn around demanding edits under tight deadlines for clients who often don't follow their own style preferences.

Solution

Use PerfectIt to accelerate mechanical copyedits that ensure consistency, freeing up critical time to focus on substantive edits.

Lise Lingo

Lise Lingo is a professional editor based in Washington, D.C. She's a member of the Editorial Freelancers Association who specializes in quickly turning around edits that hone a document's message while retaining the client's voice. The documents she edits typically contain material written by several people, often drawing on boilerplate language from older documents written for other purposes. Her corporate clients have specific style preferences, but the documents they send her often fail to stick to them.

Lise markets herself as providing "the right words, the right way, right away" and her clients have high expectations. PerfectIt helps her meet or exceed those expectations with three key features:

• PerfectIt identifies inconsistencies in terminology, capitalization and hyphenation and allows Lise to revise them appropriately in context.
• PerfectIt generates lists of abbreviations that pinpoint duplicate and missing definitions in far less time than Lise would spend on a manual search.
• PerfectIt applies style sheets that are customized for each client, enabling Lise to ensure that each document adheres to the client's preferences.

Geek Girl Editing

Heather Simental is a professional editor in San Diego. She's also a member of the Editorial Freelance Association and she runs Geek Girl Editing.

Heather specializes in editing technical and non-technical manuals, academic work, web content, and business documents. She takes pride in returning to clients a clear, correct and consistent document. She works hard to catch every error (no matter how small) and to give clients the best possible service.

PerfectIt helps Heather check that she is maintaining consistency throughout large documents, like manuals or dissertations. She uses PerfectIt before editing to get a large portion of mechanical edits out of the way and then once more after the substantive edit for quality control purposes.

The first run quickly identifies various inconsistencies in the work, such as words spelled with and without hyphens, incorrect punctuation/capitals in bulleted lists, and if table or figure headings are missing. The post-editing run helps Heather find any final inconsistencies that she may have missed or inadvertently created and provides an extra level of quality control for her work.

“PerfectIt has become a very handy tool in my editing belt, and enables me to keep Geek Girl Editing producing high-quality edits for every client regardless of document size.” – Heather Simental, Geek Girl Editing