The Broad Value of Copyediting as a Skill

By Ben Williamson @ 2024-12-03T03:49 (+17)

A short piece on why I think learning to better edit written work is a valuable skill, even as LLMs and tools like Grammarly become increasingly capable. This piece is motivated by my personal journey into EA through copyediting and the fact I’m currently advertising for a freelance copyeditor to support Ambitious Impact (AIM).

For an excellent previous forum post on this topic (from which I’ve lightly borrowed), see here.

Why Good Copyediting Matters

Clear, persuasive communication is one of the most valuable skills you can develop in your career, irrespective of the specific work that you may do. Good ideas, insight, or research are not enough. All three require action to produce impact in the world. Clear, persuasive communication is the pathway through which ideas, insights, and research can produce action. If you can’t explain what you want someone to do or convince them of why they should do it, then quite simply it’s not going to happen.

In my work at AIM, I speak to a lot of people who want to find a pathway to finding a job in EA and are currently struggling to do so. Putting aside questions of whether a narrow focus on finding an EA job is justified, I think developing cross-cutting skills like good communication is one of the surest ways of increasing your chances of being hired. Quite simply, if you can’t communicate your experience or ideas well, you’re going to struggle to convince a hiring manager that you’re the best fit for the role.

A sound knowledge of copyediting brings unique insights into good communication that are harder to glean only from writing practice. When you copyedit, you engage with the mechanics of language. Editing sharpens your focus on clarity of argument, sentence structure, and optimal wording. Seeing errors and identifying improvements can be easier in other people’s work than our own. Moulding many people’s writing gives you different ideas and perspectives on what good communication looks like. This hands-on work with the details of communication makes copyediting a particularly valuable pathway to improving your own communication skills.

My Journey Into EA Through Copyediting

If you’ll excuse a short diversion into my personal history, in 2020 I was in a position I believe may be common to many Forum readers. I was a year out of university, with a strong desire to find a career path directed at doing real good in the world and a real lack of experience that might convince anyone interesting to hire me. I was working as an outdoor education instructor in New Zealand, reading 80,000 Hours and brainstorming avenues for me to kickstart my career as a singularly transformative force of impact in the world making a meaningful contribution to improving the world.

Covid shutting down my work for a few months gave me significant time to look for possible opportunities. I’d always considered myself a fairly strong writer and editor, helping out friends during university with essays, and decided to apply for a few freelance copyediting opportunities. I ended up passing the various hoops required to join Cambridge Proofreading, editing academic essays and papers often written by people for whom English was a second language. I can’t say that this was particularly exciting work, but it achieved something important: it gave me demonstrable proof of a useful, cross-cutting skill. 

Early career professionals are frequently stuck applying for jobs to build initial experience in a field where the job requirements list some level of experience as a prerequisite. Volunteering can often help to bridge this gap. For those of us less economically fortunate, freelance work can provide a similar avenue with a lowered bar for entry, while offering some level of income. Crucially, this first step can often require taking what is available rather than what is ideal, working on something outside of EA to build a stronger basis of experience to later find EA work.

Ironically given my current position, I applied and was rejected from a copyediting position with Charity Entrepreneurship (CE), as AIM was then known, in 2020 shortly after starting with Cambridge Proofreading. However, my application was passed on to one of CE’s incubated charities, for whom I edited research reports for a few hours a month for ~12 months.

Though I’m speculating somewhat, I believe this tangible experience working within EA may have swung the decision in my favour when I applied to the EA Infrastructure Fund for an initial grant to start Effective Self-Help. Relatively clear and persuasive communication of my idea likely helped too.

From there, I’ve been lucky enough to build a full-time career founding and working across multiple incredible organisations. Copyediting provided a bridge to this work that I think I would have struggled to find otherwise.

Writing and Copyediting Are Trainable Skills

One of the most encouraging aspects of writing and copyediting is that these are trainable skills. I distinctly remember my high-school English teacher giving me a simple grammar workbook to work through independently. This workbook clarified my understanding of the passive versus active voice in a way that made an immediate and permanent difference to my writing. While I sadly do not know the name of this workbook, I don’t think the insights or exercises it contained are particularly unique. 

There are many simple pieces of advice that can make writing clearer and more persuasive. A somewhat famous example that I particularly like is George Orwell’s six rules of good writing from his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. In the spirit of Orwell’s advice, I’ve pasted the three rules I find most consistently useful below:

1. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
2. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
3. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

There is a wide range of resources and articles like this that will improve your writing skills. I am confident that engaging with these kinds of resources and practising writing with these ideas in mind will produce meaningful results. 

Using LLM’s and tools like Grammarly can also be beneficial, provided it’s done in a critical way. I’m recruiting a freelance copyeditor for AIM because these tools are not perfect. They are excellent for identifying and quickly fixing more obvious mistakes, but are prone to missing errors or making incorrect suggestions. This is particularly true when the writing in question is more technical or complex, such as with the research reports we publish for our charity ideas. 

Wrapping Up

Investing in your writing and copyediting skills isn’t just about landing a job; it’s about amplifying your impact. Doing good in the world requires being able to turn smart ideas and research into action. This, in turn, requires good communication. 

Copyediting may seem like a niche skill, but it is a gateway to improving your ability to communicate effectively. For me, copyediting provided a bridge to building a career in more impactful work. Perhaps it could for you too.