Why You Should Hire a Professional Writer/Editor

A second set of eyes can be invaluable when we are writing, and it's especially important when it comes to communicating about our business. Getting out of our own heads enough to write clearly about our work is tough! (Again, let's remember that it took a professional communicator who has been managing websites for more than a decade a whole year to set up her own website…and sometimes she's still not so sure about it.)

A friend recently gave me the perfect phrase to explain this phenomenon: You can't read the label from inside the bottle. Folks, this simple sentence absolutely blew my mind because it is so perfectly true, for me and for so many of the people I've worked for over the years.

No matter how skilled or practiced we are at writing (and make no mistake, those two things are not synonymous), we all have blind spots big enough to drive a truck through. Whether you're making assumptions or just forgetting a word somewhere, it is always—and I do mean always—helpful to have someone else in your corner when you're writing.

The concept seems pretty obvious when we think about editing. Who among us hasn't been an informal editor?

Bless Gabby Noone for this brilliant tweet.

When someone else reviews what you've written, they can spot mistakes, gaps, strange phrases, unclear ideas, inappropriate tone, and all kinds of other things we are likely to miss when we self edit. And when you bring in a professional, we can find all that and more. Personally, I take great pleasure in helping people remove unnecessary words, simplify their language, and arrange their ideas more clearly. It's almost perverse how much I enjoy it.

A good editor will save you from embarrassing errors.

(Would you believe that in my first draft of this, I misspelled both embarrassing and errors? True story.)
Found on imgur and roughly a million other places on the internet

A great editor will polish your work without making it sound like someone else wrote it; we just make you sound better. It takes practice, skill, and a good dose of humility to edit while maintaining voice. This is where a professional editor is invaluable.

Bringing in an outside collaborator might not be quite so obvious when it comes to doing the writing itself, particularly if you're an entrepreneur or executive. You're a self starter who knows your business best, so no one can explain it as well as you do, right? I'd remind you again: You can't read the label from inside the bottle.

When we know something inside and out, we revert to that curse of knowledge problem I mentioned way back when. Experts are not always great at explaining. Professional writers and communicators, on the other hand, can pinpoint the important details and the best way to share them. Another point of personal pride is my ability to take a load of information from different sources and synthesize it into something that sparkles with clarity—and to customize the information to where you're using it. Because you can't fit a whole brochure into a tweet (nor should you try), but they should complement each other well.

And not only is an outside perspective more objective, we have the skills and knowledge right at our fingertips to do the job faster. I could probably build a decent fence myself, but a carpenter is going to do the same job in far less time, and the same principle applies here. You can’t buy time, but you can hire a professional writer or editor.

So do yourself a favour, and get some help when it comes to your writing. I know someone who's pretty great at it.