Writers often ask.

Take the book or memoir, article or scientific paper you’ve had on your mind for some time. It’s now a finished manuscript. You’ve spell-checked it and read it over a few times.

Do you need an editor? Probably. It’s a rare writer who leaves no typos or mistakes in a manuscript, so the odds are good that you’ve got a few in there too. Sometimes it takes a fresh pair of trained eyes to spot them.

A good editor not only finds and corrects grammar, punctuation and spelling errors. She spots homonyms that your spell-checker software will miss, as well as incorrect word choices or idioms that could be embarrassing, like “honing in on” (instead of “homing in on”) or using “as such” to mean “as a result.”

She may also comment to you where she hits what seems to be a gap in logic or an error in sequence or anything else that snags her attention as she reads. As an intelligent reader, she can spot and flag anything in your work that might prevent clear communication to your readers.

Especially if your writing is one of your products as a professional, you want it to sound like professional writing to your readers. An editor can make sure your manuscript does that.

It’s your communication, and really there’s only one problem with that: you already know what it’s supposed to say so you may be too close to it to notice errors that another pair of eyes would spot. The intention of a good editor is to be those eyes and to make sure your communication gets across.