Agents are businesspeople and creative professionals. They’re here to help you get your book into the publishing mainstream and into the hands of readers everywhe

I’ve learned quite a bit about the function of cover letters and resumes. In this series of columns, I’ll be sharing some of those insights with you.

As the president and founder of ProofreadingPal, I’m going to try to offer you some simple advice on the various questions you’ll likely encounter, along with advice on the proofreading rates you should expect to pay.

ProofreadingPal offers fast proofreading services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Our 3-, 6-, and 10-hour turnaround speeds make us one of the fastest proofreading services available.

Having a client who is adept at em and en dashes is indeed rare. Usually we see the plain ol’ regular hyphen being used where an em or en dash would be more appropriate. Or we often see random hyphens in varying multiples scattered throughout a paper like sprinkles on a Christmas cookie.

But no, I get it, really. You are busy. Welcome to the twenty-first century, in which a book doesn’t have to be a codex to be enjoyed.

Writing is easy. Writing well is not. Otherwise, we would all be signing seven-figure deals and wondering where to put the next theme park based on our work. There are a lot of different things that have to go right for someone to break into the traditional publishing world, and a lot more for someone to achieve that super special level of sparkling international acclaim that gets noticed in the mainstream media.

Effective writing is not so esoteric as to be beyond description. There are many elements we can specify. Let's look first at structure.

Most skills are learned largely through imitation. It’s common sense that if we want to improve as an ice skater, we find someone who is better than we are and watch them skate. The more skilled we are at observing, the more effective we'll be at adapting what we see another skater do into what we can do.

When Alexander Pope (1688-1744) warned, “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” he was, among other things, explaining why editors and proofreaders – even us here at ProofreadingPal – so often find ourselves in antagonistic relationships with writers.

As a proofreader at ProofreadingPal, I see a lot of otherwise well-written documents with some gaping flaws caused by carelessness. I understand. And I like to make suggestions in addition to corrections – changing a word may fix a document, but changing a way to think about how to write is rewarding.

Some proofreaders and editors like to think there are rules, rigid rules, rules that transcend life itself. But no matter how earnest and well-meaning these folks are, they remain earnestly wrong. There is only one rule for writers, and author Mildred I. Reid phrased it as well as anyone: “The only rule for effective writing is: Does it work?”