I’m rather proud of my ability to spell correctly and follow most of the rules for our language. (Watch me fill this post with typos in accordance with Gaudere’s Law) I’m a computer person, which means that I work with a lot of other computer people. A great many of these people do not seem to be as anal as I am about such things, so I have to look at reports, signs, banners, subtitles, and other text which are all intended to be included in our final product. The problem is that once these things have been written there’s apparently no effort to look them over again to correct them.
This really chafes me, because I feel that this somehow reflects on my work - if QA can’t even catch typos (actually, we do, but the developers have other things to deal with and don’t bother to fix them) what will the consumer’s opinion of our work be?
At some point I feel like standing up and shouting, “Sweet Krispy Kremes! You guys have a terrible grasp of the written language. Give me the script strings and I’ll translate it all into actual English for you.” Now, if I could do that and get paid for it I’d be happy.
Like I said, I’m a computer person. I’m not a trained journalist or English major. I just read a lot and know how to spell, and I’m not afraid to run the spellchecker or check the dictionary when in doubt. So how would I a) convince other people that their work needs correcting and b) submit that I myself can do it? I can’t just submit a resume and include “by the way, I tend to flinch when people use apostrophes incorrectly.”
What you actually seem to want to be is not an editor (usually someone who revises writing for content, or made descisions relating to content of print media) but a copyeditor – someone who checks writing for grammatical accuracy (if you were a factchecker you’d be checking for factual accuracy).
Copyediting is considered a somewhat unappreciated profession to put it mildly. If I’m not mistaken our own Eve is a professional copyeditor, or was until recently. But should you wish to pursue it, there is always a need for freelance copyeditors, and its not too hard to break in. You can easily spin your QA experience, stressing the copyediting aspects. Check out sites like www.mediabistro.com for freelance opportunities.
I agree that what the OP is describing is a copyeditor. However, my understanding is that it is nearly impossible to become a freelance copyeditor - at least in New York for the major publishers - without several years of in-house experience and numerous contacts. I don’t know if it’s different for computer texts, which are largely published elsewhere but I suspect so in this job market. Be warned that the pay is not good, the deadlines can be brutal, and there is no respect whatsoever from anyone in the process, from editor to writer to reader.
Check out this post by a professional copyeditor to help you decide if this is what you mean by what you want to do.
But there is a whole world of copyediting outside of major New York publishers… and its the kind of work almost no one wants to do. Low-profile trade magazines and regional magazines, first-time authors… I know someone with almost no prior experience who freelance copyedits for a regional airline.
I started with newspapers. A quick read of your nearest newspaper should tell you that they do NOT put a premium on accuracy of any kind. Nonetheless they usually do hire copy editors, who aslo write headlines and photo cutlines. AP used to have an editing test that was pretty standard for applicants, with not just spelling and grammar but names of personalities, i.e., in theory they want you to know the correct spelling of Spielberg, Britney, et al., how many Ls in Hilary, and that there is no longer a Czechoslovakia.
Unless you get work for daily the pay is not great, and the hours are usually horrible by most people’s standards, often running late at night. (However, those were my ideal hours, and the job was my perfect job, so the pay didn’t really matter a lot. Unfortunately I was very good at it so I got promoted.)
There are other ways to become a picky copy-editor person but a lot of the people I know who’ve done it get fed up with the fact that it’s very hard to make a living that way, on account of the time you have to spend getting the business and then (if you work for ad agencies or small newspapers) getting your pay.
Thanks for your input, everybody. I’ll definitely check out that site Hello Again. In the meantime I’ll look around on the websites of various local publications and see if I can slap a few resumes around.