Editorial Service
Introduction
Here at Aardstorm we can use our expertise and experience in the book publishing industry to help you produce documents that are free from various types of potentially embarrassing errors or inconsistencies. This is particularly important for documents that you supply to your customers or clients: if your document contains simple spelling errors or formatting or even factual inconsistencies then it is likely to reflect badly on your business. At best you could simply look careless or unprofessional, at worst it could damage your reputation and reduce your chance of winning more business.
Modern spelling and grammar checking software can help enormously in ensuring that a documents is free from errors, but there are some types of error that are very difficult for such software to detect. For example, a word that has been mistyped to become a different but correctly spelled word will still appear in the spelling checker's dictionary and therefore will not be flagged as an error. A grammar checker can help in this situation, but only if the incorrect word destroys the grammatical structure of the sentence; a noun that has become another noun, or a verb that has become another verb, will still produce a grammatically correct sentence, but the meaning will almost certainly have changed singificantly, if not become complete nonsense.
Therefore let us help you to produce important documents by carefully and efficiently checking, and where necessary correcting them. We can either relieve you of this tedious and time-consuming task, allowing you more time to spend on other aspects of running your business, or we can reinforce your own checking efforts – it is notoriously difficult for authors to successfully check their own work, because of the tendency to read what was intended, rather than what was actually written.
We can also help you prepare documents that are to be professionally typeset for printing in volume, and then also help you to check the resulting proofs. We can use the British Standard symbols that the typesetter will be familiar with to mark the proofs up for correction. It is also important that the text supplied to the typesetter is free from errors, because a typesetter is likely charge extra to correct errors in the resulting proofs that were also present in the original text.
This service is intended as a stand-alone service for checking or editing documents produced by others; we will automatically check the text we produce through our other document services in this way without you having to commission us to do so as a separate service. You may, however, also wish to use this service to commission us to edit text that is to be incorporated directly into a larger document, along with other text produced by us.
The rest of this page describes our editorial service in more detail, including the document formats that we can check or edit for you, details of the information we will need from you to check or edit your document, and a description of how we will handle your document. See our fees summary page for details of our standard charges for this service.
Document Formats
We can accept your source document(s) to be checked or edited either on paper or in a wide variety of elecronic formats – if the file can be read by one of the components of the Microsoft Office (2003) or Adobe Creative Suite (CS3) program suites, then we can accept it. Small documents in electronic form can be supplied to us as e-mail attachments, otherwise it is better to send the information to us on CD or DVD ROM, or direct us to a section of your website where we can either read or download your document.
Editing Technique
When checking or editing your documents, we will look for correctness, consistency and accuracy of a variety of aspects, including:
- Spelling, punctuation and grammar.
- Formatting consistency, such as use of bold, italic and other font characteristics, paragraph indentation and spacing, and table layout.
- Caption formatting, and relevance to the associated table, chart or illustration.
- Cross-references to other parts of the text, to tables, charts and illustrations, to footnotes and endnotes, and including tables of contents, lists of references, indexes, etc.
- Factual consistency.
Unless you specifiy otherwise, we will use the Oxford family of dictionaries as reference to check against standard British English spelling conventions, and the latest edition of Hart's Rules to apply normal book publishing conventions.
Where appropriate, we will adapt our checking to the styles and conventions used in your document. For example, where a word can be spelled in different ways that are equally valid, it is still incorrect for more than one version to be used within a single document. We will therefore enforce the version that is used most frequently. Similarly, for technical terms or names that do not appear in our dictionaries we will assume that you have spelled them correctly unless multiple versions occur, when we will assume that the most frequently used version is correct.
Editing Results
For documents that you supply to us on paper, we will mark them up with corrections for any errors that we find. We can use the current British Standard proofreading correction symbols for this, or an adapted version that is more easily understood by those unfamiliar with the standard symbols; please specify which version you want us to use.
For documents that you supply to us in electronic form, we can either provide a list of corrections for any errors that we find, or we can edit the electronic files to correct them for you. If the file format supports some form of modification tracking feature, we will use it to highlight the changes that we have made.
Editorial Process
The process used by Aardstorm to check and/or edit a document to your requirements will normally consist of the following steps:
1. Request Quotation
You request us to supply a quotation for the checking or editing of your document. At this point you need to supply us with sufficient information about your requirements for us to accurately estimate the work involved in checking your document. This will include such information as:
- The type of document to be checked, and the format (paper or electronic) in which you will supply it.
- An indication of the amount of text contained in the document, such as page size, number of pages, frequency and size of illustrations, etc.
- How we are to supply the results of our checking to you – whether we are to mark up the paper document you supply to us, edit the electronic file you supply, or supply you with a list of corrections.
- Any special requirements, such as spelling or formatting style conventions, you may have.
2. Supply Quotation
On receipt of your request, we will use the information you supply about your requirements to estimate the amount of work and other costs involved for us to chek or edit your document. If anything about your requirements is unclear, we will request clarification from you. We will then produce a firm quotation and send it to you. This will include a firm price and schedule for the work to be done (subject to no significant changes to your requirements), together with a summary of your requirements so that you can check that we have understood your request.
3. Place Order
If you accept our quotation, and decide to commission us to check or edit your document, you then place a firm order, and, if necessary, pay a deposit of 50% of our editorial service fees. At this point you need to also supply us with the full document that you want us to check or edit.
4. Check or Edit the Document
Once we have received your document, and any necessary deposit, we will then check or edit it in accordance with your requirements. We will finally supply you with the results of our work, for your approval, along with our invoice for the remainder of the fees due, which you should then pay.
Communication
Throughout the editorial process, communication between us will normally be via e-mail; you will therefore need to supply us with a valid e-mail address that we can use to contact you. If you require one or more face-to-face meetings, we will be happy to visit you, but will charge extra for the travelling and subsistence costs incurred.