Copyediting a Story
Name: Issaga Issa
Job Title: Writer
Client’s Requirements: Issaga needed his spiritual story to be copyedited before publishing his book. He also asked whether we could provide him with some general feedback on how his story sounded, whether we liked his story overall, and whether it was good enough for publishing. The work was agreed to be completed within four days.
How We Helped: We first read through his story twice to see what the overall story was about, how the tone, style, and structure of the story were, and whether the overall message of the story was resonating with the intended target audience. Having read his story, we could see that the message was clear, powerful, easy to understand, and relevant to the audience. However, we wanted to make the story even more powerful and appeal to a wider audience. We edited sentences by reducing sentence lengths to make them have a greater impact on the reader, capitalised and italicised words where necessary, introduced a wider range of punctuation, and made paragraphs shorter. We then assessed which aspects of the story needed to be explained in greater detail, of which we made sure to do by adding more and clearer explanations where necessary, and reducing the detail of other parts, to keep the attention of the reader intact. Our final checks then consisted of making sure the clarity, style, and tone of the story were consistent throughout, and the story was free from any spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors.
End Result: The work was returned to Issaga within the agreed timeframe. Issaga was very pleased with our service and continues to use our services to this day. His story will now make up a part of his book, which will be sent for approval by the publishing agency in hopes of publishing his first book.
Client Feedback: “The editing sample of the story got me hooked to begin with. The professionalism of Alkyone is terrific. They picked up so many things; their attention to detail was incredible. They are a very professional and experienced editing company and polished up my work nicely.”
