Editing an autobiography 

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Editing

"But I’ve fixed all my mistakes."

By the time you’ve knocked out three or four drafts your autobiography should be in reasonable shape. Now is the time to bring in the experts and pay a professional to take a look.

Even if you’re only intending this for distribution among the family or friends it is worth doing – if a job is worth doing then it is worth doing well.

There are different types of assessment and levels of service that you can use. You can have a "readers report" this is a surface-level read, someone just reads it and let’s you know what they thought. They will mention if there were lots of spelling and grammatical problems but won’t give details. They will also say where they feel the autobiography is good and bad and in what way, so that you can correct it.

An "editor’s report" goes into more detail and will also let you know whether the editor thinks that your work is publishable in the mainstream. It will also go into more detail as to what ought to be changed, and will spot inconsistencies.

Copy-editing is a service that will fix all spelling and grammar mistakes while maintaining your style. The fact is that it can be very hard to see your own errors (which is why the "reading aloud" trick is very useful). Copyeditors will also fix inconsistencies if they can, otherwise they will be mentioned.

You can let friends and family read it at this stage but ignore anything they say, either they’ll be mean, or they’ll be nice – but only because it’s you, it will be nothing to do with the quality of what you’ve written.