AI writers are tools able to automatically generate content for blogs, articles, books and other types of writing quickly and efficiently, this from only a few words inputted. as such, they are set to revolutionize the future of writing and copywriting.
AI Writers offer opportunities across stakeholders
With the help of AI writers, authors, writers and copywriters can now focus on what they do best – crafting engaging stories that capture their audience’s attention. Businesses can generate blogs at a more sustained rate to quench their readers’ needs.
The rise of AI writers
Their speed and ability to generate high-quality content at scale are making them increasingly popular with digital agencies and businesses. AI blog generators can also be used to create unique content quickly and easily, eliminating the need for manual research and plagiarism checks. With the help of these tools, copywriters can create compelling stories that engage their readers, in no time.
The crucical role of editors in the rise of AI
With the rise of AI writers, editors have an even more important role to play in the writing process. They are the interface that humanises, customises and corrects machine input and are responsible for reviewing the content produced by AI writers. They are the last check before the content reaches its audience and the last opportunity to ensure that content meets brand, customer and legal requirements.
The role of editors in the rise of AI writing tools – quality assurance
Editors have the crucial responsibility to ensure that the content produced by AI writing tools is of a high quality and meets the standards required. By working together with these automated writers, editors can help ensure that content produced is up to scratch and meets all necessary industry standards. This will not only benefit businesses but also readers who will be able to enjoy high-quality content.
The standard role of the editor remains
We’ve already seen that the editors’ role of providing high quality assurance remains. Editors are also still expected to help to ensure that the structure, meaning and flow of the content is correct. They can also help to proofread and check for any errors or inconsistencies in the text, ensuring that the content automatically produced is free from spelling, syntactical and most importantly semantic errors and mistakes.
The role of editors – Refining content
The role of editors is becoming increasingly important in refining the automatic content produced. As these tools become more sophisticated, editors will be needed to review and refine the generated content before it is published. Editors can help ensure that the content generated by is accurate, and engaging for readers.
A role for editors – Branding content
Editors can also help to ensure that the content created by AI writers fits into a company’s brand identity and messaging. By working together with an AI writer, an editor can make sure that all content produced reflects a company’s values and meets its standards for quality. With their expertise in copywriting, editors can help to ensure that any content generated is both brand-relevant and engaging for readers.
Editors as Ghostwriting aids
In the same vein as branding businness content, editors play a vital role in the use of AI writers as ghostwriting tools. They are there to ensure that the voice of their client is heard, and to give human colour to the output produced by AI writers so they mirror the identity and voice of the supposed writer. Editors hence help ghostwriters create better books and ebooks by providing guidance on structure, tone, and flow.
A role for editors – Feedback providers
With all their sophistication, AI writers are still not perfect. There is a great role for editors in providing valuable feedback to these tools on how to improve the content they generate or how to make their writing more effective. Their input helps to refine these tools and their functionality, and increasingly improve to produce more autonomous and advanced outputs.
Where to find editors who know their work
Editing is an art. It is not simply about rewording sentences in a way that makes sense to the editor. It is about targeting the audience with the voice of the writer in the best way that the medium allows : short, SEO-proofed and snappy on web log, accurately descriptive on a historical report, exhaustive and revealing in an evaluation, mysterious and engaging in a thriller, and at all times, aware of and conveying the intricacies of the language and the uniqueness of the author’s voice to their niche. This is 3E Web Media content editing power. Find us here or on Fiverr.
I have been editing people’s writing for over 25 years now, from proofreading theses to pay for University fees, to magazine article editing and more recently entire books. I thought it would be most useful to speak about what I thought was important in editing, and how it releases the full strength of writing.
The writer’s goal
It is important to decide from the outset what your goal is when you write. If it is to impress your immediate entourage, friends and family basically, to seek approval, or to be known as a published author, then maybe you don’t need to edit your work. There are people who will buy your work as a gesture but never read it. You have nothing to worry about as far as those who will read it: every one is a critic. But they can’t take it away from you: you will be a published author. The DIY publishing or self-publishing world is at hand and mostly free. No need to promote your work, just add the title to your profile to wow the many superficial onlookers.
The professional writer’s ally
But if you are writing for the sake of the message, the sharing, the audience, if you are or want to be a professional writer, then you must have a professional ally. Because editing is about getting the best out of your book, your article, your content whatever it is. It requires guts and insight, time and focus on the one hand and a dose of humillity on the other to embrace the experienced opinion of your first reader and harshest critic, your editor. It is not about keeping the author in their safe and comfortable haven where they have been dreaming and writing the dream. It is about taking them from the expression of their story to the communication of it to their audiences. It goes beyond proofreading to ensure that the book can be understood and relatable beyond the familiar context that the author may daily live in or even address. It opens up the book and content to its global possibilities beyond the author, the immediate lessons of the story, the visible lines inked.
Editing: A fresh pair of eyes
The writer lives in the world they have created, first in their heads and later on paper, no longer able to distinguish what they know of the book and what their writing has actually made clear. A fresh pair of eyes is the opportunity not just for a fresh pair of eyes, it is one for a new perspective which challenges the writer against any gaps or holes. This means that giving editing to a friend who agrees with you or understand your way of thinking is not going to help.
A little anecdote: Is an editor writing still an editor?
Not long ago, I wrote the preface of a book. It turned out somehow, that as an editor, I had been expected to have edited my own work. It is actually hard to explain this to people at times when they are not open to what it means. A fresh pair of eyes is not there to undermine your knowledge, to refute your abilities, but to point out what anyone, bestseller, editor, author or god, can no longer see when they have been living in it for too long. When I edit, I do it in stages and live a few weeks between each set of edit so I can look at things anew. But the writer lives with a book for a rather longer time and it would take years for them to truly appraise their oeuvre.
Editing: Structure
Ideas are clear in our minds and the fact that we are trying to recreate our mind world to share it with o
thers require a flow whose logic is a little more universal than our personal one. Many editors are great at checking spelling or grammar mistakes and even at sussing where the right word has not been used. These functions are increasingly challenged by artificial intelligence that create spell checks and grammar correctors a
nd even thesaurus and other meaning helpers. But no amount of technology so far can truly fully do that work and further, can ensure that your structure is meaningful to a reader that does not have your background and context to understand your writing the way you present it. How many film script have you got lost in because the writer lost the direction of their own plot? This happens more often that you can imagine as a writer providing a context to a friend they want to edit their book. Neither help and both only make the point of this article.
Editing – Content
There are a lot of people out there who are story tellers than there are people who have books. This is because a lot more people than you think are great are telling the story and less so at writing it. They have a way with words that is nourished by the presence of an audience, the response of this public and the wish these storytellers have to entertain and share. It is hard for this type of story tellers to think of themselves as such because when it comes to writing, even though they are literate and can read and write, telling their story in written words is hard.
An oral people
Most of the time, authors, story tellers and readers alike forget that we are first and foremost an oral people. It is not just an Afri
can thing despite being most practised there, it is a human thing to do. We learn to talk, provided we are not impaired naturally, accidentally or contextually, before we learn to write. We learn to hear sttories, even those that are written before we learn to and start reading them. We think and often talk faster than we can write, which in itself can, nowadays, be sorted out with a dictaphone. But in order to tell a story, like my daughter’s questions prompt in me, there is no better stimulator or motivator than the right audience and the right question, and that is what a good editor is. I know many would argue at this point that ghost writing and editing lines blur but to be able to guide someone to express their story in the best and most heartfelt way possible is different to asking them questions so that you know what to write on their behalf, the latter being ghostwriting of course.
Edition: Style – Voice
One of the most important and most difficult task in editing is for the editor to recognise the style of the author and while editing to keep it. The author has their audiene, people like them who are looking for a voice to express what might be hard for them to do and that voice has to transpire throughout. Especially as editing goes beyond proofreading, it beccomes more important that it remains about enabling the author’s voice to best express itself. That voice has to be recognised when it speaks at interviews, as it authentically reads their favourite passage of the book, as it recognises its words and revisit their sense, plunged as reading does to one, back to the situation they have described.
Editing: Flow
There are so many ways that the flow of a story can be broken when the writer’s ideas are coming in faster than they physically transcribe them. Again here, their knowledge of what they intended to say will often superseede what they actually see on the paper. It is not just about another set of eyes, it is about that set of eyes, starting the denouement of a flow and understanding where it is broken, whether it is with intent and whether and how it needs mending. Broken flow can work to create suspense and relate parallel stories or events. The editor should be able to see through what would work and whether this continues to speak in the author’s voice.
The invitation / The first line/sentence
Take a lot of time with the first line of a book or even of an article. It is the first impression of your content, of you, of your article, of your book, sometimes even more than the title. More importantly, it is the reason why people will read on, or discontinue reading. It should be an invitation to the reader. It is the hand holder that takes them into your world. You know your audience and you know your story. How would you keep someone looking for an excuse to go not just from leaving but wanting to know more? Take time with the first line. It is one of the most important part of your book after the cover.
Your editor might tell you that the first sentence is written first and many a time, rewritten last. As your story guides you to its end, you sometimes realised what the entry scene is and with it the entry message. Having someone coming to your bok without any knowledge of it whatsoever is one of the best opportunity for you to have someone to review that first invitation into your world.
Editing: The title – a promise
Yes, a title is a little more of a promise about what there is to come than it at first appears. It’s the implied sentence ‘ This is what my book is about and this is my style and my confidence in the delivery’. While the first sentence gets you in gear for the rest of the story, the title tells you about the story. It should in a way that boasts its assurance while highlighting or warning even of its content without revealing it at all. This can be done, for example, either via:
The main character as a title
I always loved The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry which warns you about the ways of a man who in effect is not a bad man as such but who will trample often on life and friends in order to get to its goals, in this case the truth on a bed of logic. I always found lazy the use of the main character’s name as title but Candide, the book by Enlightenent French philosopher Voltaire, is one of the exception as the name is like the hippopotamus, the very nature of the character and the reason for all that happens to him as a consequence. We could argue though that naming a character after their character is a little bit on the nose, but there are circumstances to be considered in the 19th century context when philosophy needed to wear lamb’s clothes to hide its wolf’s indignations from the powers that were, for fear they might not be published at all. Aesop’s fables of course use this method for most if not all of their titles, although none of the animals have names and only their species is mentioned, often attached to the object of their personality. For example, mention of the fox carries an assumption of cunningness, tortoise of slowness and so on.
The main object (physical or abstract) as title
One of my favourite book of all times is Das Parfum by German author Süskind. Grenouille is the main character and his nose leads him to olfactory obsession for the perfect scent and eventually to murder. The title is humble yet is all. It says perfume confusing the stench of the impending murder without ever lying to the audience. Pride and prejudice are the abstract objects that lead the story in the novel of the same name, and like the previous novel, are characteristics of the main characters. A similar thing is done with the book “This book is full of spiders”, a definite synopsis and warning all in one, without a hint of meaningful spoiler.
What title to choose?
Of course, many books and guides might give you what seems to be an exhaustive list, but each book should be able, by its originality and uniqueness to kindle a unique title. An editor will help you suss that out so you can have a professional title that fits your book like a glove rather than an amateurish title by the numbers. There is even a chance that you thereby create a new category of titles!
Editing: The summary, content presentation or trailer – whetting the appetite
My niece wrote her first published story at 17. The summary spoke of a Cinderella story, so I must admit I was a little disappointed as I just expected a well-written rehash of the Disney takes. I don’t think I have been prouder of the work of anyone. The girl took us by surprise with a work that, first and unexpectedly, understood the essence of the story often hidden in the frills of style and magic with which traditional tales and filmographic adaptations encumber it. Secondly, one had to read the summary to remember it was a Cinderella story: the tale was so busy having depth, realism and expressing relatable and heart-tearing events that it did not have time to do what its predecessors thought was important – trying to reassure the audience that Cinderella was a victim and that magic will get her out of it. The shere maturity and unique perspective of the theme was refreshing. The summary was right but in no way was it revealing of the plot. This is a difficult thing to do when an author wants to show that they are unique and worth a read as they tend to want to reveal it all rather than just wheting the appetite. The only thing she omitted to do was to be edited.
Conclusion
I became an editor because I do it naturally; I edit even without realising it. It is a shame to lose a good story to mis-expression, errors pertaining to the structure. the orthograph, the syntax or semantics. I love entering the world that someone created and filling the gaps they would miss from knowing their world too much. that their knowledge of that world might not help them notice. I am hard on unedited books because the reader’s time must be respected (you don’t believe me, check some of my book reviews at Fussy Tongue): the least that the writer should do is be professionally edited. will take someone’s time to read but not take the time to. Even AI writers still require editing: I wrote a whole evidence of an article about it. I encourage you to get your content professionally edited to ensure quality and excellence for your reader and show them the respect for the time and sometime money they invest in you. Check our editing services today.
The making of Coffee Nubia logo was one of the most exciting enterprises we had been given. The idea was to reflect the essence of this café. This is not just a coffee place, it is a hub that welcomes the African Caribbean community regardless of tribe but also any other races for one of the best coffees but also African, Caribbean and European delicacies. It puts the city of Manchester in the diaspora’s map.
Many coffee places, although serving other products, use coffee as the centre of their symbolism. This is an aspect that the quality of the coffee served urged to reflect, without getting its aroma and strength lost in the one-dimension of such superficial symbolism. Coffee, it was going to include but not just coffee, exactly like the place itself.
Coffee Nubia logo design – reflecting a community, a hub
The foundation of the place resounds in its name, Nubia, which refers to a region of Eastern Africa. The first thing we thought about therefore is to go to the other side of Africa to look into the symbols that characterise the other aspect of the hub. So, unavoidably, we looked into and browse through Adinkra symbols looking for a representation of what it is that Coffee Nubia represents for its community of customers. The Adinkra signs contain many attractive and adequate signs in terms of their meaning and impact.
The community aspect resounds in the BOA ME NA ME MMOA WO1 symbol meaning “help me and let me help you” and represent the cooperation and interdependence which distributed diasporas are reminded of in such few places as the café. FUNTUNFUNEFU DENKYEMFUNEFU, the “siamese crocodiles” is democracy but ore importantly in our context, unity in diversity.
NKONSONKONSON, the “chain links” means unity, human relations and mainly confirmed that there could be quite a number of options for this project. Together with the ESE NE TEKREMA, they were a favourite because they looked like a bean, which would allow me to include the coffee. The latter symbol has the the literal meaning “the teeth and the tongue”, and represents friendship, interdependence but also, But I was not satisfied.
Going even deeper in the symbolism
Then I came across the ‘chief of all Adinkra King, the ‘chief of all Adinkra designs’, the Adinkrahene. In everything it was, it appealed to us and represented the project. Its strength and shape was coffee. Its responsibility and leadership. Its inspiring character is reminiscent of those moments when great authors are typing their opus in coffee places, businesses are being set up at the corner of such places, people are getting together ideas to lead the future. That was the symbol we were going to go with. Not at once apparent yet clearly unveiled.
It is one thing to find the symbol to design, it is another to design it. The Adinkra hene is perfectly formed in most of its designs but when you look into it for too long, it is like getting lost in a cup of coffee. In effect, it looks like the circles of any liquid into which a drop of liquid is falling. We explored this, the designer and myself for a while. I felt we were near the final idea, but I still felt it was missing the essence of the coffee, the after-taste, the impact.
Elevating the stain
This is where it occurs to me. Just like we take for granted the origin of our inspiration, such as how the comforting homeliness and hospitality of a coffee shop favours our ability to reconnect with our inner muse, there is a part of sitting at a coffee place that most of us completely ignore or even try to wipe out, the coffee stain. Those circles, in which I once saw liquid dropping into liquid suddenly became the stain that a cup leaves behind, similar to the trail of its presence that is the aroma in the air. There it was, the idea I sought, I found it. Certainly some will still see it as just-poured coffee and we did our best to allow for that because it is different perspectives that make a hub. But the coffee stain , the leftover after all is drank and said, is that little surplus that this business offers.
We weren’t out of the water yet. Branding is an identity that had its shape but begged for the remaining elements of its look and feel. The colours, the font, the size, they all had to be determined, played with, evaluated, eliminated or selected. The final colours chosen were not just there to say Coffee and Nubia, they were also selected as a canvas to showcase the multiple colours and vibrancies that each individual and group brings to Coffee Nubia.
There are over 1 billion websites in the world (you should see them counting up every second!)1, a number by far different from the real total once the number of inactive websites are added. It is easy to see why, with all the work that is required not just to develop a website but also to keep it running. Digital developments, web x.0, Internet enhancements, hacking, bugs, patches, competition are as many words that any online presence has to deal with on a regular basis. For that, a website, an online course, a digital application requires on-going maintenance to keep up with the changes prompted by the opportunities as well as the threats thus presented by the Internet. This “oiling of the machine” involves Website Monitoring, Website Updates, Website Security, Website Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Content Refresh.
Monitoring
It is by monitoring your website that you can find out about its availability and access to it. A number of extensions provide monitoring features, many for free within reason. They will allow users to monitor their website’s availability and even sometimes to identify the source of the downtime. Knowing where to find the problem, how to tackle it diligently is paramount to reducing disruption to your digital presence and to the services that you offer and therefore to your customers. There is no automatic functionality that provides this kind of functionality or in fact skills and it is highly recommended to employ the services of a knowledgeable business such as ourselves.
Updates
Website updates are an important part of keeping your website fresh and active. To ensure those updates do not adversely affect your website settings or content, you need to follow a rigorous process of maintenance that requires backing up, staging, upgrading, testing and sometimes restoring. This needs to be done for each application that requires updating and can take time and be precarious.
There are four common types of updates:
The core upgrades that relate to the framework itself on which your website is built e.g. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal…
The extensions upgrades that relate to any additional codes that you add on to perform more specific functionality. In WordPress for example, these are the both common essential plugins pertaining to security, monitoring and performance, and business specific ones e.g. e-commerce or booking.
The user interface upgrades keep the look and feel upt-to-date. These are for example the WordPress theme updates or Bootstrap updates
In WordPress, there are also Translation file updates
WordPress core alone has had 19 updates in the 8 months just between Jan and Aug 20162, an average of over 2 updates a month. WordPress minor and security updates are automatic and JetPack lets you setup automatic updates for extensions in your website. Nevertheless, not all can or should be automatically updated and you must ensure you can still go back (restore your website to its pre-upgrade state if the update goes awry) and therefore allow yourself time to backup your website before the change. In addition, you will need to test your website to ensure that all upgrades have been successful and that your extensions and website functionality and look and feel continue to work with the new core codes the way that you expect them to. The more extensions you have, the more upgrades you will need, each preceeded of course by a backup for safety, and each followed by a test for quality assurance. You can see how the work can slowly but surely escalate your maintenance time.
Security
Security is the most obvious requirement of a website on-going maintenance and yet it is often taken for granted. There are a lot of applications that will help website owners ensure security. Yet again, it is a question of identifying a security issue, preventing it in the short term but not analysing the issue behind the symptom. You can get to the bottom of issues on your own or you can get a security service such as ours to help.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation tends to be forgotten once a set of keywords have been chosen for the content and the website has been submitted to search engines. It remains important after that to maintain the website’s visibility and competitive edge. Regular analytics inform strategic digital marketing and this is something that keeps your site active, search engines aware and your digital business competitive.
Content Refresh
Although last, content is definitely not the least and in fact might just be the most important aspect of maintaining your web presence. Unlike other maintenance aspects discussed before, content refresh concerns not just websites, web applications or online courses but also other digital presence such as social media, email newsletter and digital marketing such as banners and guest postings.
Keeping a blog or a way to continually speak about your business, its stories, its successes, its lessons, its news, what others say about it clients and press alike and a lot more is the best way to tell potential clients, current customers, competition and search engines that you and your business are active, knowledgeable, constantly fresh and highly competitive.
There are integrations that can be done between your website and your social media to allow every new article to be advertise on your social media. However, these types of automation won’t do is to choose the right content to re-advertise, to personalise messages to each social media, to find what people want to know about and refresh the content to answer specific questions and much more of what only the human touch and digital skills can do together.
Check Refresh
One of the most time-consuming but nonetheless enjoyable parts of my work is to ensure that I am aware of the latest changes in technology. Now systems you use might alert you to security or bug fixes, enhancements or new features but one thing they might not always do or at least not completely is to let you know about new or best practice, new processes or just tips that make your life as a consultant easier. Don’t get me wrong, they do: they send newsletters, tips… Some of them even have announcements, notifications and other such little messages within their software. However, what I am talking about is the fountain of knowledge that is so often buried in super long forums, barely has the time to completely fit within the timely walls of networking events. When I go to the Adobe Articulate community forum, I feel saturated with information, great ones, but still staturated. Reading the WordPress news, going to its ‘codex’ and thousand and one place where the information exists is just, well work, specialised work.
Linking
Your website will have more than one link, including external links (pointing to other websites) and internal (pointing to webpages within your own structure). Part of maintaining your website involves checking that all these links continue to work as other websites might stop working, move things about and your own website might lose search engine credibility if it hosts so-called ‘dead links’. Part of maintaining your website therefore involves ensuring that none of your customers comes across a dead-end which turns your site into an amateurish presence and leaves the client wanting and definitely looking elsewhere for their answer. Tools like WordPress have such built-in or add-on functionality and this will reveal itself to be a great asset for the webmaster passionate about offering their customers a professional digital presence. It is worth feeding the results of such tools to strategy to help them minimise addition of such types of urls in the first place as this kind of exercise might not be feasible too frequently. Check not only for dead links but also for redirects as those slow down the linking and do not in general look very good. In addition to verifying external links, it is definitely worth checking internal links. Finally it is an advantage to ensure that linking to your website is maintained. Having people linking to your website shows search engines that other websites trust you, but what you want to ensure is that the right websites point to you, and the right words are used to label those links. This is not about dictating what others should do with their websites but about ensuring that those you have a good enough relationship with can ensure that the backlinking is actually optimally mutualy beneficial. In fact, it should be part of the backlinking discussions in the first place to ensure that the other party understands what label you would prefer associating any link to your website with: there is such a difference between cheap websites and affordable websites!
Conclusion
The Internet offers great opportunities for today’s businesses. With 40000 Google searches a second, you cannot afford to not be listed among the first options. In addition, knowing that new businesses come only every minute, keeping your competitive edge with a consistently up-to-date fresh website business. You can do it yourself, no doubt, with all the digital tools available around, and distract yourself from the business of your own skill, preferring DIY to professional help in the midst of a competition that employs knowledgeable professionals. Or you can make sure you hire the services of the likes of website maintenance specialists such as 3E Web Media. We offer different options depending on how big the website is in terms of the number of applications it uses, to allow you to chose the relevant options for your needs or you can simply contact us for consultancy or custom requirements. Let us take care of your Website Maintenance or let us guide you at the very least, it would be our pleasure.