What best describes your business identity?
Commissioning a review of proposed signage before it "goes to press" can prevent embarrassing errors from being memorialized in marble, stone, metal, vinyl graphics, and other costly durable materials. Of particular note are general building signage and plaques, wayfinding signage, and historical maps and markers. Adjunct literature and promotional items can also be part of the picture.
The material quality of what you publish sets a brand standard, positive or otherwise, that the public associates with your imprint, logo, or colophon. Care invested in producing literate, truly intelligent intellectual properties translates to many decades of repeat business. The assistance of a finish editor at key points in your process can help keep your legacy business in high regard over the long term.
You and your associates are already doing everything possible to achieve perfection for your clients. Having a finish editor view a project when you need fresh eyes can afford an added layer of refinement—and possibly help preclude undesirable third-party feedback about copy that was flawed, or something essential that went missing. Incorporating a final-pass-type review as necessary can ultimately help you enhance both your reputation with clients and your position in the advertising community.
You might, for example, be in-house counsel readying an end-user license agreement that will be seen by thousands of people online. Or you might be a sole practitioner who wants to clean up the "English" of a standard contract destined for frequent use at your law firm. Or an entrepreneur hammering out a PPM to raise capital for your new venture. Or maybe a small-business owner who has just written a first article for a trade publication or has started a blog. Or a physician launching a new Internet site, hoping its content is error free. Or a CPA working with a graphic designer to update an office brochure. If so, or if you find yourself in a somewhat similar circumstance, a finish editor can review your material before it goes public, to help you be seen in the best possible light.
In your type of work it's likely that you interact with clients or customers directly and must be accountable for certain kinds of details that fall outside your area of expertise. A finish editor can assist you by identifying details you might otherwise miss. This gives you the opportunity to head off potential issues well before project completion, and to speak from a place of authority. It also allows you to offer your clients an additional level of service and certainty rarely had.
As a storyteller first and foremost (the writer of nonfiction included), you're expected to entice your audience to forget the outer world, however briefly. "An excellent story well told" can best engage those gatekeepers the scriptreader, the literary agent, and the manuscript screener if the nuts and bolts of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and formatting don't trip them up along the way. That is, even though these elements are not essential to telling a good story or captivating a reader's interest, they suddenly get to be important if they "break the proscenium" for that all-important one-person decision maker. As you proceed up the ladder, either toward the publication of your book or the production of your screenplay, the cleanup a finish editor provides can help you present yourself as the intelligent writer you are.