Professional Editing Comes To The Masses With Scribendi

A professional editor and proofreader has typically been reserved for big media companies or agencies. But now there’s a low-cost editing and proofreading service available to anyone — journalists, corporate communicators, bloggers and writers of anytime — in Scribendi.

We’re proud to welcome Scribendi to Social Media Explorer as a new sponsor. You can see their advertisement over there on the sidebar, but as always, we decided to test and review the service before we welcomed them to the endorsement category. Yesterday’s post on Minimum Viable Products was actually proofread and vetted using Scribendi.

The service is really simple to use. Sign up for an account, choose the type of document you need edited (everything from full-on manuscripts to business letters to blog posts), upload your Word or Text document, select how quickly you want it returned (they do up to 10,000 words per 24 hours) and pay. Scribendi charges per word and the cost fluctuates based on how many words. It ranges from $0.01 to $0.06 per word, so a 500-word blog post won’t run you much more than $12-13, and that’s if you ask for a fast return.

You can also download and install its WordPress plugin to take care of your editing needs without leaving your blog’s administrative panel! That’s pretty cool!

For my submission of yesterday’s post, my rate was just under $14 for a 24-hour turn-around. I could have gotten in cheaper had I given them 2-3 days to do it. When they were finished, I received a note from my editor and two versions of the document to download:

I also received changes-tracked feedback within the Word document to help me know where they found issues. This not only helps me see what they’ve changed and approve or override the change, but helps me know what I might be doing wrong consistently so I improve as a writer.

If there’s anything I can attest to after 20 years or so of writing professionally, it’s that if you don’t notice your mistakes, or have a proofreader or editor notice them for you, your audience will. The reaction can be from quite polite to detrimental to your business. And yeah, it can be annoying, too. Twitter has a lot of nosy Ph.d’s in English grammar for some reason. Heh.

Nonetheless, Scribendi can solve that problem and for a fair price for writers of any genre. Give ’em a look-see. It’s well worth the investment.