Do you want to improve your freelance writing or editing career? If you do, an online course gives you just the skills you need!
Clients worldwide are always on the hunt for reliable editorial talent for their company’s digital content, so let that be you!
How Proofreading and Copy Editing Courses Help Advance Your Freelancing Career
Your first encounter with editing might have been when you volunteered to proof your friend’s essay and realized editing was one of those essential skills needed for written communications regardless of your eventual career path. That, and you just couldn’t bear all the typos and grammatical errors.
If you’ve taken up a creative career path, you may have spent some time working through creative rewrites for your favorite books, from reworking whole chapters to writing new scenes, or painstakingly penciling in proofreaders marks whenever an error was found—since no mistake could pass you by, grammatical or otherwise.
Now you’re thinking about becoming a professional editor, nostalgically reading through old Microsoft Word documents as you dream of new skills that will level up your content.
Yet, as you already know, editorial work is more than just correcting typos and removing excessive commas.
Growing your editing skill set through a copyediting course is beneficial for many reasons.
Learning Editorial Skills Helps You Become More Competitive in the Market
Language and writing skills are important in almost all occupations. No matter who you are and where you work, your performance is often judged by the way you present yourself in messages, emails, and various business documentation.
You can use your newly acquired skills to produce clean content at work or for your own creative purposes. Whoever reads your writing will have an impression of a thoughtful professional with strong language skills and attention to detail.
Becoming an Editor Is a Step Up in Your Career
Are you freelancing at the moment? If so, editing can become an additional service through which you can expand your freelancing business. If you’re a writer—that’s even better! Editorial skills help improve your own writing. You can even start your own proofreading business!
Editorial Skills Boost Your Publishing Success
Learning editorial skills helps in your personal publishing efforts as well. Your work is more likely to get picked up by a magazine’s editorial team or a publishing house if extra care is given in polishing your writing. If you wish to self-publish, then you can do your own editing. That saves both time and money and gives you full creative control of your writing!
Proofreading and copy editing courses are online training seminars that help you become an awesome professional copy editor.
These online classes teach you the steps to edit written material and provide basic knowledge of grammar, editing, and structure for anyone wishing to improve their overall editing skills.
Launch Your Editing Career shares the secrets of meeting industry standards. We provide all the needed tools to learn successfully:
Training Material
We provide the necessary learning materials you’ll need to master the craft and hone your skills. Editing is a practical skill, and training materials are essential to improving as editors.
Our course creators have provided templates, checklists, sample edits, and more to help you learn and support your freelancing work after completion.
Editorial Course Training
You’ll maximize you client base by learning how to transform raw content into even-structured, accurate, and impactful pieces for better reading.
Our training materials help increase productivity and performance and focus on:
Line and Technical Editing, AND Correcting Grammar Errors
We’ll show you how to ensure a document has impeccable spelling, structure, and how to remove syntactical and grammatical errors.
Content Correction
Detect, correct, and develop pieces of content that have an excellent writing style, consistency, accuracy and are free of typographical errors, or readability issues. We even cover detecting plagiarism through fact checking.
And more!
Keep in mind that most certification programs don’t teach English language grammar and syntax. You are expected to already have this knowledge before starting an editing course.
With Launch Your Editing Career you will build a strong foundation.
If you copy edit content intuitively, you might miss important pieces to make the content amazing.
Online proofreading/editing courses show you what the exact, professional approach to copy editing and proofreading looks like.
Although being a certified proofreader/editor isn’t a must, many prospective clients prefer their proofreaders to still have a document that attests to their abilities.
Many copy editors and proofreaders claim that their clients never ask to check their certifications and credentials. This particularly goes for those freelance proofreaders and editors who attract clients through referrals.
An average client you’ll come across likely produces content on their own, writes their blog posts, or outsources writing content to other websites.
Yet, You Still Need an Online Copy Editing Course. Here’s Why:
If you’re just starting your copyediting career, taking up an online copyediting program to become a certified copy editor is a great way to learn to do the job like a professional. Plus, it gives you the needed credentials that increase your chances of consistently working remotely if you’re competing with other freelance editors and proofreaders for the same project.
That being said, certification alone won’t be enough for clients to provide you with those job opportunities. Copyediting experience is also needed to learn what readers and authors prefer, how they communicate, what their usual preferences and requirements are, and so on.
If you are an aspiring editor, chances are that you’re careful about what you invest in. After all, the best online certification programs cost quite a bit, and they also require plenty of time and effort.
So, are they worth it? Of course, they are! Our Launch Your Editing Career Course Bundle can help advance you as a copy editor in many ways:
1: Get a Hang of Language Rules
Written language has many subtle nuances that are easy to overlook when editing and proofreading text.
All languages change and evolve, including their rules, policies, conventions. Style sheets and style guides also change across different publishing industries, niches, and content types.
Our copy editing course gives you the chance to learn about all of these changes. You’ll also learn how to apply rules and conventions that book publishers use and prefer so that you can better adjust your work to market demands.
2: Learn Modern Language Copyediting Fundamentals
Language itself changes over time. It evolves and new ways of speaking, writing, and phrasing emerge.
Contemporary language may not fully align with grammatical and literary rules, but editorial mastery still requires you to edit for a reader base first.
Our courses help you reinforce this knowledge and build a solid understanding of when to break the rules to write for different demographics, generations, niches, and understanding of key topics that interest them.
3: Gain a Competitive Advantage by Building Your Brand
A copyediting certificate gives you an edge over the competition when starting your new career. Many employers won’t even consider an application without proof of qualification, particularly in publishing. Certification can be a useful tool if you’re just starting out and don’t have a lot of experience And often, a certificate is needed to build copyediting experience.
Finding your first few clients is bound to be challenging and a certificate gives you easier access to those who want to work with beginners. Your first client might know that you don’t have experience, but your certificate shows that you have the basic knowledge and required basic training to make their content amazing.
As you can see, online editing certificate programs help you improve skill sets and open you up to more job opportunities. But, how do you decide on which online editing course to invest in? Here are a couple of suggestions:
Budget
Online editing certificate courses come in different shapes and sizes. Not all copyediting certificate programs are the same and many courses even have a one-size-fits-all approach. Some courses take a week, while others last for months at a time and often run the high in terms of price.
Editorial certificate program pricing is one of the early barriers and important factors to consider when deciding on a course.
Reputation
Many employers will consider you if you have certification from an organization of high esteem in the industry.
Some clients and employers will most likely only trust a handful of certificates through notable institutions (e.g. UC San Diego), so be certain to check what certificate program is the most valuable in your niche and if specific required courses are recommended.
If you’re still unsure about which program to choose to upgrade your freelance business, you can get more information from the Editorial Freelancers Association, or the American Copy Editors Society.
Editing Skills That Editing Certificates Offer
Price and course duration depend on the type of skills and qualifications that the course promises to help you gain. Better language and grammar mastery means more time needed to learn and practice your copyediting craft.
Advancing your editorial career first requires boosting your skills, for which an online course is an invaluable tool. According to UC San Diego, the average student spends hours online or in person, learning to adhere to set style guides all while keeping key topics in mind when revising digital content.
Various courses can provide you with the essential skills required to master written material, whether in a digital landscape or in print.
English Copy Editing FAQs
1: Do I Need a Copy Editing Certificate to Be a Copy Editor?
Not officially. However, building a portfolio and a professional track record can be challenging without documentation that proves your grammar smarts and copyediting wits.
2: Is Being a Copy Editor Stressful?
The short answer would be: no! Copy editing can get busy if you’re working on larger content quantities, but this is rare! Most of the time, editors truly enjoy their work of improving word choice, fixing things that reduce the content value, and working together with writers to improve the creative value of their content.
3: Is Copy Editing a Good Career Choice?
Copy editing opens career opportunities, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be copy editing full time. However, job descriptions and payment structures vary so much that it becomes difficult to anticipate whether you’ll have regular income and job stability.
Freelance proofreading and copy editing allows you to set your own rates. However, you’re not guaranteed work unless you find clients on your own. You can also work as a copy editor for companies and brands in different industries, they will need you to proofread their business and promotional content (e.g. their home page or other web pages).
These jobs are usually more reliable, bring higher income, and have more job stability than freelance. It’s similar to working for a book publishing house. You have constant, regular work, but you’ll also be required to work standard hours offline or online.
Plus, full-time copyediting jobs with big companies, like magazine editing and publishing houses, more often than not require experience alongside a course qualification or certificate. It might take some time before you gain the right background for this line of work.
Launch Your Editing Career and Learn From Experienced Editors!
Copy editing classes help you gain the required skill set and expand the range of services that you’re able to provide.
You have a chance to upscale your freelance career from proofing your college roommate’s essays for spare cash and Launch Your Editing Career, so why not take it?
