Every copywriting firm needs to have strong writers and editors. As an English editor in Bangkok, your job is to be as invisible as possible, while doing everything you can to help your writers achieve their goals.

Nobody writes a masterpiece for their first draft, but you should avoid the temptation to leave your fingerprints all over their work. Let the copywriter find the right words to express his/her perspective — and if you aren’t sure whether or not to make an edit, don’t do it. There’s a reason why the writer’s name is on the work, and not yours. In the end, they are going to take all the credit (or blame) for what is on the page; your job is to make sure that what is on the document is exactly what they mean to say.

Some copywriters in Bangkok have enough talent and experience that they are able to produce a strong document in an early draft. Other times, you might not be so lucky.

As an editor for my local newspaper in America, I occasionally saw pieces of copywriting that were full of information, but had no real organization and no main focus. It happened to the great writers as well as the less experienced ones: Sometimes they just had too many ideas. Sometimes they didn’t have enough. At moments like these, proofreading for punctuation and misspelled words is the wrong priority. Structure comes first; as a general rule, you need to get the nuts and bolts right before you start painting the house.

In an ideal situation, the writer and editor will sit down and read the piece together, talking through the main ideas and making the necessary adjustments to highlight and clarify the most important information, while maintaining an appropriate tone and an intuitive, easy-to-read style. After that, it will be time for a careful proofreader to check the document for the final time.

In some cases it will be impossible to collaborate so closely with your writers, and when this happens you may have to make some judgment calls. But the essential questions remain the same in either case: Are the main points easy to see? Does one idea lead clearly to the next? Is it easy to follow the writer’s thinking?

If so, then you’ve got something good to work with — and you can take a second look at the introduction and conclusion to ensure that they are as eye-catching as possible while still being faithful to the spirit of the rest of the piece. Beyond that, your duties as a Bangkok proofreader will mainly involve just some routine tidying up and checking the author’s choice of words, so that the material produced at the copywriting firm can be both memorable and vivid.

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