Why I’m an Amazing Editor

Rebecca Zeines
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read

In part, because I love it. But not only.

I absolutely love the process of literary editing. I’m a freelance copywriter, French<>English translator and copyeditor. I love having all of the different projects that these fields offer me, yet it’s that last one that I love doing the most.

Being an editor is bearing witness to another person’s creative process and helping them find the voice that works best for them.

I help my clients cultivate a written voice that they like, ranging from a formal, teacherly voice to a much lighter and friendlier tone. I help them write about fitness, meditation, health and resilience to how to buy a car from a dealership or the technicalities of web-development.

The topics my clients work on is one of the many reasons I love what I do. I wouldn’t necessarily sit down and study the scientific process of muscular development through calisthenics, yet ghost-writing a post about it taught me some of its intricacies.

Thanks to my role as an editor, I learn new things every time I am hired to do some kind of work. It’s amazing how much I learn and how much it ends up helping me out too.

Learning about the value of having a franchise and building a real estate brokerage ended up providing me with some awesome advice for my mother, who’s a real estate broker.

Editing an ebook about buying a car from a dealership gave me some smart pointers to keep in mind when I recently bought my own used car…even if it wasn’t from a dealership.

Researching the healthiest ways to build resilience shone light on aspects of my life I sometimes choose to ignore and am now once again focusing on.

All the while, I learn how to create a funny voice, a formal voice. I learn how to help others appear to be an authority in their field simply through their narrative.

I create things with my clients, even if I am not the one to do the creative creation. As an editor, my creative juices flow with coordination.

I see all the pieces of the puzzle my creative clients have come up with, and I play Tetris with them until they paint a beautiful literary picture that ends up being a perfect — sometimes a better — representation of my clients’ vision.

I help the creators create and it’s absolutely enthralling each and every time.

Rebecca Zeines

Written by

Copyeditor, Dreamer, Agile Facilitator and all-around joyful misfit

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