Citing sources is essential to playing it fair in writing! Imagine spending a ton of time and effort to putting together a document of your own ideas based on your own research, and then someone comes along and pretends it’s their work. All they did was slap their name on your paper, and now they get all the credit! Unfair! That’s exactly what you’re doing to other people when you don’t cite your sources. Whether you’re directly quoting or paraphrasing someone else’s ideas, give credit where credit is due. Always. Another reason for citing sources, other than giving credit to others for their ideas, is to allow the readers to find those sources for more information. If you read a book with a lot of amazing quotes originating from a single book, you might be interested in reading that book. But you wouldn’t be able to do that if you didn’t know which book it came from.

It may seem easier and cheaper to have an all-in-one editor, this way you get all the editing done in one go. Let me tell you why you shouldn’t do this.

The process of becoming a better writer can take a long time, and learning is essential to the journey. As shared by several English degree graduates, there is often no immediate vocational payoff with these programs. Rather, you get the foundation you need to continue practicing the craft before seeing success. Several writers have mentioned pursuing further studies or work experiences that allowed them to resonate with current literature and think critically for their next narrative. If you’re interested in becoming a better writer, here are some qualifications you should consider undergoing.

There are a lot of things to consider when hiring an editor, so here are eight tips to help you make the right decision.

Imagine someone telling you a story at a party. It would be a hilarious story—except that they suck at telling it. Their words are jumbled, and they’re so long-winded, and they messed up the punchline. It’s just a mess. This is what line editing fixes in your story.

Overwriting often happens with amateur writers. New writers think they need to explain everything to the reader for them to understand. This means there’s lots of meaningless description without much progression of the story. The reader is pulled out of the story and gets bored! So, let’s learn how not to do that!

You may think a quick spell-check (or a thorough one) and reading the document a hundred million times is a good replacement for hiring editors. You might even send it to friends and read editing blogs and do all kinds of other things to help you do a better job editing your own book . . . but it’s not the same. Hiring a professional editor is invaluable, and here’s why:

Language changes and develops with the people speaking it. We do not speak the same in 2022 as we did in 1622. Not even the same as we did fifty years ago! Conventions and meanings change. This means we may have been taught rules that are no longer important. And somehow, some of us have been taught things that were never rules in the first place.

I want to go through some of these grammar “rules” that aren’t rules at all so we can stop worrying about them.

There are several types of book editors that do different jobs and come at different stages. You’ll want to hire them in the correct order, otherwise someone’s word (and your money) will be for naught. Let’s go through the four main types of editors and what they do!