The PerfectIt Blog

Here you will find tips and tricks for more efficient editing techniques and improved content. Explore a wealth of ideas, practical advice, and industry best practices that will help you save time while improving the quality of your written documents.

Styles, Business of Editing PerfectIt Styles, Business of Editing PerfectIt

Can You Give Editing Advice Without Colleagues Hating You for It?

People resent being corrected. No matter how big or small the problem is, no one likes to feel scolded. You may be the office editorial expert, but your co-workers won’t welcome unsolicited instruction on how to use software they’ve been using for years; and they certainly don’t want to hear that words they’ve used their whole lives are offensive to company stakeholders.

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Business of Editing PerfectIt Business of Editing PerfectIt

The Top 10 Undefined Acronyms/Abbreviations

Most abbreviations do require a definition. In any case where readers might be confused by TLAs (three letter abbreviations), it's important that they be defined in the text or in a Table of Abbreviations. A research proposal or article with complicated and confusing abbreviations is one that will quickly face rejection. The problem is that authors become so familiar with abbreviations that they forget to define them. To test how prevalent the problem is, we used PerfectIt, the add-in for MS Word that locates undefined abbreviations, to check 3000 randomly selected documents.

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Business of Editing PerfectIt Business of Editing PerfectIt

Ten Tips for Self-Editing

The best way to self-edit a document is not to. Seriously: You should get an editor’s help whenever you can. The cost is probably less than you think. The work will come back faster than you think. And you are better off if you don’t try to go it alone. You can find more details in You Should Hire an Editor.

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Business of Editing PerfectIt Business of Editing PerfectIt

The 17 Kinds of Hyphens You Must… Wait, Seriously, 17?

Hyphens are like little screws that hold words together. Now, if you’ve ever gone to a hardware store to buy screws, you know that there are a lot of different kinds of screws. But hyphens? They all look the same – well, within any specific font, anyway. So you might think there’s just one kind of hyphen. You’d be wrong. Full-on, abso-bloody-lutely wrong.

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Business of Editing, Proposal Writing PerfectIt Business of Editing, Proposal Writing PerfectIt

Check Your Proposal or Bid Document for Free with PerfectIt

If you’re bidding for a contract or responding to a request for proposals (RFP), it doesn’t matter whether it’s small or large. From research funding in the thousands to infrastructure in the billions, there’s always a great deal at stake. Whether it’s jobs that depend on a contract or research that can alter lives, the outcomes of proposal documents could not be more significant. That’s why it’s crucial that your words make the best impression.

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Business of Editing Daniel Heuman Business of Editing Daniel Heuman

Non-breaking Spaces: How to Check Something You Cannot Even See

Non-breaking spaces, also known as no-break, non-breakable, hard or fixed spaces, are characters that look exactly like regular spaces. You cannot see the difference between a non-breaking space and a regular space either on the page or on most screens. The difference between a non-breaking space and a regular space is how it is treated if it happens to separate two words at the end of a line of text.

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Business of Editing PerfectIt Business of Editing PerfectIt

Should You Use Accents in Your Text?

With each of these examples, you have a choice to make. Should you include these special marks, or leave them out? These are diacritical marks, or diacritics, and they include accents, cedillas and more. Often, the term ‘accents’ is used colloquially for all of them, and that’s the term we’ll adopt here.

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Business of Editing PerfectIt Business of Editing PerfectIt

How to Find Brackets and Quotes Left Open

Why do small mistakes slip through even when we try so hard to iron them out? Scientists are only beginning to come up with answers. For instance, psychologist Tom Stafford of the University of Sheffield explains that writers make errors because they are busy concentrating on the high-level task of conveying meaning, whereas readers pick up typos because reading requires less brain power.

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Business of Editing Daniel Heuman Business of Editing Daniel Heuman

Editing Tips from the World's Worst Editor

I've never understood why people think I must be a good editor just because I designed PerfectIt. PerfectIt is used by over 1000 professional editors around the world, including over 400 members of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. But I didn't design PerfectIt because I'm a good editor. I designed it because I'm a terrible editor!

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Business of Editing PerfectIt Business of Editing PerfectIt

Man versus Machine: The Ultimate Editing Challenge

By beating Gary Kasparov in 1997, Deep Blue proved that a computer could beat the best in the world at chess. But what about editing documents? For years, the idea of computer-aided editing was little more than a joke. However, in the age of voice recognition and machine translation, have computer checkers reached the point where they can defeat professional editors at what they do best? One editor agreed to take the challenge.

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Medical Writing

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Proposal Writing