All manuscripts are edited in MS Word using “Track Changes”, so you can then take our completed work and easily see what changes were made. Explanations will be provided in the comments so you can see why changes were made, rather than blindly accept based on the premise of “they made the changes so they must be correct”. We don’t believe in that. Our role is not only to polish your work and give you the most professional end product but to help you grow as a writer. If you use “lay” where it should be “lie”, or “lay” where it should be “laid”, it’ll be explained in full why the changes were made and examples will be given so you can fully understand the logic behind the change. Next time, when you come to write “lay”, you’ll hopefully remember what was explained in the comments, or, at the very least, it’ll spark a memory that’ll cause you to quickly check the Internet “what’s the difference between lay and lie” and you’ll use the correct term.
As well as commenting to help the author, we’ll also create a detailed spreadsheet as we go through your manuscript. Every time a new person is introduced, they’ll be added to the spreadsheet along with a description, who they are, and what their relationship is to other characters. So, if you’ve mentioned early on that they were blonde (we’ll also make note of whether you use “blonde” or “blond”), and later on, you mention their brown hair… we’ll make a note to come back to that at a later point after seeing whether they were later referred to as blonde or brunette. If only those two instances exist, we’ll flag it up and let you know that you’ve used both hair colours and let you decide which one to go with. Similarly, if you happen to refer to someone as Claire’s sister, and then later write that Claire was their cousin, we’ll make sure it remains consistent.
This extends beyond mere characterisation, though, and we’ll take notes of any specific spellings you might have, any words you’ve created for your own universe, locations, currencies, and even the type of punctuation you use. If, for example, you’ve used spaces on either side of ellipses up until a point and then switch to no spaces, we’ll see how many instances of each exists and make changes accordingly.
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