..you think your spellchecker and grammar checker are reliable.

Most of them would not have caught the errors in these two weird sentences:

Aren't spill checkers and gramma chickens grate? If yew think sew, reed no father.

Unfortunately, spellcheckers and grammar checkers are part-time workers with only a few benefits. They alert you to possible problems and then ask you to solve them. ("Do you want to use passive voice here?") When it comes to spelling, most are fine with any word that is correctly spelled, even if it makes no sense in the sentence.

In contrast, I'm a ridiculously insane, picky, nonstop editor.

When I'm trying to choose a meal from a menu at a classy restaurant, I get sidetracked looking at the misspelled words, the misused commas, and the lousy descriptions. Listening to the news is a nightmare of inappropriately-used words. A drive in the country is a horror of hand-painted signs. "Fresh Gerogia peachs hear." Yikes!

Since I must live with the inconvenience of being an editing vigilante, you might as well use it to your advantage. Once you've slaved for hours or days or months over a letter, catalog, article, or other document and read it over and over and OVER, you may actually become blind to errors that often occur in the editing process. Perhaps you've experienced the excitement of receving a thousand copies of a brochure or sales manual you worked on for weeks, only to have blatant errors jump out at you and scare you half to death!

Often finding a better word also means that word's sentence needs rewording too. If you're in a hurry, you might not think about that. Or maybe you rely on someone else to input your last-minute changes, and maybe that someone else doesn't always understand what you mean (and has a tendency to sometimes wing it a little).

What you need is an insanely picky editor like me, a pair of fresh eyes that will carefully inspect your document for anything that could lead to the dreaded comment -- made after thousands of copies are in print -- "Why didn't anyone CATCH THAT?????"

Turnaround is fast for short documents and ASAHP (as soon as humanly possible) for longer ones. Call or e-mail me for more information.

Other services offered to businesses, non-profits and authors:

• Sales letters and advertisisements with impact
  
• Fundraising materials
  
• Research
  
• Permissions correspondence
  
• Help with personal memoirs, family histories, novels, and stories