Copyediting and proofreading services

Elevate your content with expert support.

Your content is a reflection of your business. To make a great impression, it needs to be clear, consistent and error-free. But it’s tough to identify and eliminate every spelling mistake, misplaced punctuation mark, and structural or stylistic issue from a piece of content — and often, it’s a task best left to outside eyes.

Why partner with Ascribe for copyediting and proofreading services

Whether it’s a blog, article, white paper or any other piece of marketing material, your content is a reflection of your business. To make a great impression, it needs to be clear, consistent and error-free. But it’s tough to identify and eliminate every spelling mistake, misplaced punctuation mark and structural or stylistic issue from a piece of content — and often, copyediting is a service best left to outside eyes.

Stylistic consistency

Our editors can work with the style guide of your choice to ensure consistency within the document and across your communications.

Consistent tone of voice

Increase brand recognition and trust by infusing your content with your organization’s established voice and tone.

Diligent formatting

In addition to reviewing all text, our copyediting services also apply consistent formatting of fonts, paragraph spacing, heading levels and other visual elements.

Flexible approach

Choose the level of intervention that suits your project goals: from simple proofreading services or light copyedit to a stylistic rewrite or substantive overhaul.

Up-front alignment

As a first step for larger editing projects, we share a sample edit of a few pages or a section so you can assess our level of intervention, tone and other elements.

End-to-end support

As well as providing copyediting services, we can partner with a design agency to take you through to layout, then proofread to ensure an error-free final product.

Copyediting and proofreading

Royal Canadian Mint coin catalogues

The Royal Canadian Mint produces some of the world’s most beautiful coins, which it promotes to collectors through a variety of high-quality marketing materials. Ascribe has established an on-call relationship with the Mint that includes copyediting and proofreading its marketing brochures and catalogues.

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Frequently asked questions

While there’s a lot of crossover between these two services, the big difference is when they’re used in the writing and editing process. Copyediting is the in-depth, line-by-line review of a draft document to ensure clarity of meaning, grammatical correctness, concision and airtight logic. Proofreading is the last step in the process: the final set of eyes to make sure there are no errors (including in spelling, formatting and layout) before the document is published.

The amount of time it takes to complete a copyedit depends on a few factors, most notably the length of the document and the quality of the original draft. In general, a blog will take less time to copyedit than an e-book or white paper. Meanwhile, more complex or technical subject matter typically takes longer to copyedit than simple, plain-language text. At Ascribe, we calculate our copyediting project timelines by applying different pace rates according to the level of intervention required — anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand words per hour. But in every case, we ensure our team works through your material with acute attention to detail.

It is highly recommended to do a proofread after a copyedit. Copyediting comes earlier in the writing process, focusing on grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, stylistic consistency, tone and flow. After we’ve completed our copyediting services, our clients might choose to make further changes to the document before it’s published. In these cases, our proofreading services are like the final seal of approval — and are critical for polished, error-free work.

Absolutely. Our copyeditors can work with a style guide of your choice to ensure the tone of your writing is not only consistent but also easily recognized as the brand voice of your company. We can make adjustments and suggestions to strengthen the tone and style based on your intended audience and goals for the document.

First and foremost, our copyeditors bring exceptional attention to detail when doing a thorough, line-by-line copyedit of any material. Also, by aligning your document to the style guide of your choice, we ensure everything is consistent from start to finish in terms of capitalization and punctuation, how headings and subheads are treated, and so on.

Copyediting and proofreading are separate steps in the writing process and shouldn’t be done at the same time. Copyediting is most useful when a draft is still in progress, while proofreading is best saved as one of the last steps before publication. We do recommend having copyediting and proofreading services done through a single agency like Ascribe to ensure consistency at every stage of your project.

Learn about the four types of copyediting we offer