Writing Prompts – Page 427

The Ideal Candidates for Proofreader Jobs

Decide whether to apply for proofreader jobs

When considering a literary career, the first job that springs to mind is that of writer. However, there are many different career paths within the writing industry. As well as writing jobs, you have the option of pursuing editing jobs. Not everyone enjoys the stress of editing, though, and a less stressful alternative is proofreader jobs. Just consider whether you have the right temperament for proofreading before you start searching for available proofreader jobs.

Location, location, location

Not so long ago, proofreaders were limited to the opportunities available in their neighborhoods. People living in big cities had more options than those living in small towns. Yet small-town residents often enjoyed living away from major urban centers and wouldn’t consider any career that would require them to move to a city. The Internet changed this imbalance of opportunities. Now it is possible to find proofreader jobs online, which opens up a world of options for people living in rural areas or areas with few employment opportunities in the publishing field.

Types of proofreader jobs

Anything and everything that anyone writes for commercial purposes needs checking. The simplest explanation of proofreader jobs is that they require you to check through something that someone else has written and correct any mistakes. This particularly applies to spelling, grammar, and typing errors. You will often find, however, that the people interviewing candidates for proofreader jobs are looking for evidence of specialization. For example, the style and complexity of academic papers necessitate the use of a language that is much different than that used in sales brochures. If you are skilled in checking other people’s work, the subject of the piece shouldn’t really matter. However, in the real world, it often does, and you will find yourself searching for proofreader jobs in specific fields, such as technical, medical, academic, or general proofreading.

Proofreader personalities

The ideal proofreader is methodical and reliable. Often, the proofreader is the last person to approve a piece of work before it gets published, so there is no room for oversights or errors. Proofreader jobs require total concentration, and candidates who can prove they are not easily distracted are likely to excel in this career. You have to be thorough in applying spelling and grammar rules to someone else’s work. Also, you don’t need to suggest improvements in style or tone to do well in these proofreader jobs.

Someone who is easily bored or likes to handle several tasks at once should not apply for proofreader jobs. If you cannot sit still and work from start to finish on checking an article, you are likely to miss sections or waste time rereading parts of the text. Fidgety, lively people are more likely to get job satisfaction from creative work, and such people should aim for writing or editing jobs rather than proofreading.

Lifestyle

Some people can cope with stress and an unsettled home life. If you are able to completely switch off from your daily troubles when you go to work, you might consider applying for proofreader jobs. Employers may look at your personal circumstances when considering you for a proofreading role. Be prepared to be turned down for personal reasons if your résumé does not clearly demonstrate that you have a stable home life. Proofreading is not for everyone, but it can bring a financially and emotionally rewarding career to those with calm and methodical personalities.

Editing Courses Can Reboot Your Working Life

Sick of your job? Check out editing courses

Career breaks are increasingly common. Maternity leave is a well-established reason for a woman to put her career on hold, but travel, volunteer work, and hobbies also provide many workers with reasons to step off the career ladder and take time to explore other avenues. If your career break lasts too long, you may find your absence has rusted your abilities or that your field has progressed so quickly that you will need to retrain, go back to the bottom of the ladder, and start again. If you seek a new direction, you might find editing is to your taste.

Career switch

There may be a personal reason you left your career, or maybe you just didn’t enjoy the lifestyle that came with the job. However, you still need to make money, and maybe you don’t want to go back to school and start over again. You need a career that you can feed your existing knowledge and experience into. Recent developments in distance learning mean that editing has become a viable option for those seeking a new career. Online editing courses make it possible to find a new career without leaving home.

Knowledge bank

Whether you realize it or not, your previous career has enriched you more than just financially. You have acquired experiences, tips, and tricks that outsiders would take years to pick up. Many professional jobs require excellent written skills to write proposals, meeting minutes, and appraisals. Without realizing it, you have built up experience as a professional writer, even though those writing tasks seemed secondary to your main job at the time. In fact, those methods of communicating your experience, knowledge, and professional opinions served the actual purpose of your employment.

Transformation

If you are good at spotting mistakes in other people’s writing or if you can always find a better way to express a writer’s ideas, you may be a suitable candidate to become an editor. You can’t expect to become a senior editor straightaway. You will need editor training and can benefit from taking editing courses.

Distance learning

If you used to be a nurse, you would be an ideal candidate to edit articles and books on medicine and health care. If you used to be an industrial engineer, you should look for opportunities to edit brochures, user manuals, or sales documents for industrial equipment. You will find it easier to get into editing if you resolve to specialize in your previous area of expertise; from there, you can always branch out into other fields. To improve your chances of landing a trainee position, you could take a few editing courses. Fortunately, you can take editing courses online, so if you are a stay-at-home mom or a surfing fanatic, you can prepare for your new career while maintaining your current lifestyle.

Editing courses

“Editing” is not one standard role. A range of tasks are involved in the process of editing, and each can be taken up as a job. The number of editing courses available matches this range of tasks. For example, proofreading is a key part of editing, and all potential editors would benefit from editing courses in this field. You may decide to focus on just this task for your new career, so you should explore online proofreading courses.

Do I Have to Attend a University to Do an Editing Course?

There is an alternative path to taking a college editing course

Publishing is an old and learned vocation, and the academic route to editing has been established over the hundreds of years of the profession’s existence. In the past, you had to be within the ivy-clad walls of a university to take an editing class, but the industry has moved on. Thanks to the Internet, you no longer need to give up years of earning potential to take an editing course, and you do not need to go to university to become an editor.

University courses

The traditional route to becoming an editor is to get a degree in an English subject, such as English literature, or a more specific subject, such as American literature or journalism. As the number of English-related university courses expanded, a wider range of specialized courses became available. However, despite the exciting learning opportunities these courses offer, they are not suitable for everyone. Not everyone can give up the opportunity to earn money to take an editing course at a university for four years. The prospect of paying tuition fees and buying textbooks and equipment also bars many from taking a university’s editing course. The costs and loss of income mean that university study is still a luxury available only to some.

Geography

Not everyone lives in a large town with community colleges a short bus ride away. Those living in a big city like New York, London, or Toronto could enroll in a part-time editing course or night school at a nearby school to learn while they earn. However, if your town is too small for these educational opportunities, you are left with two options: giving up work and moving to a faraway university or giving up your dream of becoming an editor.

The Internet

So you don’t have thousands of dollars to enroll in a university, you need to pay the rent and support the family, and you live in the middle of nowhere. What chance do you have of taking an editing course? Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, there is a solution to that dilemma. You can take a university editing course without having to actually go to the university. As long as you have an Internet connection in your home, you can enroll in a part-time distance learning course.

Professional training

Some see universities as too out of touch with the real world. After observing rapid changes in technology in your daily life, you may feel a three-year course could be out of date before you even finish it. Fortunately, publishing houses and editorial services now offer their own courses. This means you can take an editing course from a company that knows the daily issues involved in editing. Companies engaged in editing shape changes in the industry, so an editing course from an editing company will adapt quickly to the changing requirements of the job.