5 Reasons You Need to Hire a Content Editor

I regularly run across scenarios where the red line fails. Sometimes the software will underline a word that is spelled correctly—it’s just not in whichever dictionary the program uses. This happens quite a lot when you get into technical or academic terms.

And sometimes the opposite will occur—spellcheck will miss an error. Here’s an example I found while reviewing for an Amazon retailer.

Fifty-nine percent of consumers polled said they would not buy from an online shopping site that had bad spelling and bad grammar.

They mentioned a “stock-out,” the industry term for “I ran out of something I was selling.” The correct spelling, however, is stockout—all one word, no hyphen.

No grammar checker will catch this error because it looks like a regular compound adjective, which is usually hyphenated. It required a human being (me, in this case) to see it, question it, and look it up in the dictionary to discover the mistake.

Other commonly misspelled words that spellcheckers often miss include:

• “Upfront” (it’s actually two words according to Merriam-Webster)
• Hyphenated words ending in -ly (e.g., “a highly-engaging read”—no hyphen is needed!)
• “Complement” vs “compliment” (two very different words in a business context!)

Now, you might be wondering, “So what? No one cares if a word is slightly misspelled, do they?”

But the facts suggest otherwise.

Polls have shown that 59% of consumers said they would not buy from an online shopping site that had bad spelling and bad grammar. It’s not hard to extrapolate from there that even simple spelling errors could be causing people to bounce from your website.

Editors act as sanity checkers

Writing well is hard.

It’s a difficult endeavor to take an idea in your mind and translate it into words on a page. It’s more difficult still to arrange those words in a way that makes sense to anybody else.

Even the best writers don’t always hit it out of the park. Part of a content editor’s job is to look for this, call it out, and fix it.

This often comes in the form of unclear antecedents—again, something that software may not find because it’s not a rule-based mistake but a context issue.

Take, for example, the following sentence: 

The dog and the cat chased each other, but eventually it got tired and wandered off to take a nap. 

When I dropped this text into Word, nothing happened. I even ran the Editor feature, which returned no issues.

There’s no grammar or style issue at play—which means this is something by definition no grammar or style checker will be able to catch.

But the sentence itself is still unclear and poorly written—which animal tired of chasing the other? Based on just reading this sentence, we don’t know, and Word can’t see the problem (neither does Grammarly).

Another common example I see is information lacking enough context to make sense.

Let’s say you copy and paste a statistic into a new blog post but don’t include enough surrounding information to make sense of it. Your brain doesn’t catch this because it does have the information.

You’ve now potentially left your readers in the dark without meaning to.

But because your editor is on the job, they can highlight this kind of issue, which means you can correct it before publishing.

Again, there’s no grammar or style issue at play—which means this is something by definition no grammar or style checker will be able to catch. It requires a human touch.

Editors notice overly repeating words

When a writer uses the same or similar words over and over again, especially in close proximity, it can make for less-than-stellar content.

There may be no grammatical problem with overly repeated words, but you stand a good chance of boring your readers.

Part of a content editor’s job is to scan documents for this kind of repetition and suggest a wider variety of words to give the reader a better experience.

This can involve anything from using the same adjective multiple times in a sentence or paragraph to using the same transitional phrases again and again.

There may be no grammatical problem with these practices, but you stand a good chance of boring your readers if they stay in your document. You need a qualified set of human eyes to watch for this and correct it.

Editors ensure short- and long-term consistency

Whenever I start with a new client, I ask if they have a style guide. Often they don’t, in which case I build one for them.

Why? Two reasons:

1. There are often multiple acceptable ways to write a word.
2. Many companies and industries have unique, nonstandard terms, such as product names, that won’t appear in any dictionary.

The upshot of this is a software program can’t decide for you in these cases. It has no idea which “correct” spelling variant you prefer or what your particular product is named.

Other examples I run across include:

• How to write times – 9:00 or 0900? AM, am, or a.m.?
• How to abbreviate or shorten – US, U.S., or USA? 10K or 10k?
• How to choose among variant spellings – forgo or forego? Naive or naïve?

A software program has no idea which “correct” spelling variant you prefer or what your particular product is named.

Decisions like these must be made among the people involved. No algorithm can make these kinds of choices for you. Then, once the preferred term or method is documented, it takes a person to ensure they are consistently used throughout all of your content.

Editors spot misused homophones

There are some mistakes a spellchecker won’t find because no words are misspelled.

I once reviewed a document mentioning the use of “sleep aides” in getting enough rest. There’s just one problem: the author was speaking about products such as melatonin pills. The correct term to use is sleep aids.

Aide with an E refers to a person who helps someone else—an assistant. I am sure there are rich people out there who hire aides to help them get to sleep at night, but for the rest of us, when we can’t sleep we use sleep aids.

There are some mistakes a spellchecker won’t find because no words are misspelled.

It’s true that programs like Grammarly will catch some of these types of errors, but “sleep aides” made it through the gauntlet—in this case, Google Docs, Grammarly, and multiple other sets of eyes—until I found it.