Why Human Editors Are Still the Best
Editing technology has come a long way since the days of a stack of paper and a red pen. There are so many ways to check you’ve spelled everything correctly, you’re not missing any punctuation, and your text is clear and concise. Although you have these options on your computer and they can save time, having a human go through your text is still the best option when looking to perfect it. Technology does not have the deep knowledge humans who have studied this do—its suggestions are sometimes incorrect, as you’ll see in the examples below.
Example 1: Confusing “your” with “you’re”
These two are, as the Word spellchecker notes, some of the most commonly confused words in English; however, the spellchecker itself has confused them! “Your” denotes ownership and “you’re” is the contraction of “you are,” so the original text has it used correctly. (Word should hopefully catch the actual typo in that sentence.)
Example 2: Unparallel nouns
In this example, Word’s spellchecker suggests one noun be plural and the other not, even though they should both be.
Example 3: Passive voice vs. active voice
Although active voice (when the subject of a sentence does an action) is oftentimes the best option for your writing, sometimes passive voice (the subject is receiving the action) is better or unavoidable. In this description of how Peking duck is made, passive voice works better because it doesn’t matter who specifically is hanging the duck to dry. Following Word’s suggestion and changing the sentence to be active would make it confusing.
Example 4: Singular or plural
Word has flagged the words “productive few hours of painting.” This one should be obvious: more than one hour is plural.
Example 5: Word should be double-checking itself
Word seems to have problems figuring out which words should be singular and which plural. Just because the word “one” is in the sentence doesn’t mean whatever comes after it should be singular. More work, indeed.
Although technology can be a helpful tool in polishing your text, as you’ve now seen it’s best to have a human editor take a pass or two to catch these and larger errors. If you’re ready to push your documents to an even higher level, contact PAI Consulting today to get started!
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