Bringing sense to the web
Type “web content editing” into Google, and almost all of your top results will be for software that edits web code, not text. You’ll find the odd site that offers advice on writing for the web. But no results lead to companies that provide editing services exclusively for web content.
We think that’s a shame, because people who want quality editing for their websites will have to dig fairly deep to find viable options. With the Internet being the main source from which vast (and still growing) numbers of people get news, information, and entertainment, there is a lot of room to improve the standard of writing on the web.
Software has come a long way, but use it much and you’ll see it’s no replacement for a flesh and blood editor. One of the most notorious examples of this is the thesaurus in Microsoft Word. “Information,” for example, seems a common enough word. MS Word takes the trouble, though, to treat it as two and suggests such synonyms as “in order,” “in sequence,” and “in turn.” We’ve checked and the oversight persists in Word’s latest version (2007).
... there is a lot of room to improve the standard of writing on the web.
Similar pitfalls abound. One of the most treacherous (but sometimes humourous) ways that editing software will disappoint you is when you happen to have spelled a word correctly (“principal”) but used it in the wrong context (“Decisions need to be based on principals”). (In case you’re up late, it should be “principles.”) Computers are wonderful at crunching vast amounts of data, not, unfortunately, at governing something as subtle as human language.
As the web matures (and as great as it is, there is still lots of room for growth), we’ll see more and more companies dedicated to editing web content. For now, we seem to be one of the few out there. It’s a bit lonely, but we’ll do our best to bring sense to what people are saying on the web.