Are you an author of a book (be it a chapter or looking to do the whole thing), whitepaper, or other type of publishable document? Are you writing a presentation and looking for a better way to put it together? Having trouble with writing session abstracts for possible speaking engagements – or ones you are being asked to do? Are you looking for an honest review and assessment to make whatever it is you are working on better? If so, SQLHA is announcing a new service for you whether you are a new writer just writing one chapter of a multi-author book or someone who has been around the block more than once.

Since the mid-90s, Allan has written countless numbers of documents from single page marketing slicks to near-1000 page books. He’s reviewed and tech edited most of those things, as well. While every publisher is slightly different in their formatting or templates, you still need to write compelling content for your readers. That is easier said than done. While your publisher (or maybe you are self-publishing) may have an official reviewer, you want someone to give you the straight scoop on your writing to make it sing rather than croak. This is where SQLHA’s new services for reviewing and editing come in.

Whether it’s your first draft no one else has seen and you want to whip it into shape before anyone else sees what it is you’re working on, or it’s later on in the process and you want a more formal review, we can help. Some of the things that we look at include:

  • Content – Is the content itself complelling and worthy of publishing or do you need to still shape it and mold it into something with more focus?
  • Phrasing – Whether you use one word too much or have odd phrasing, if your document is hard to read, no one will finish it.
  • Translatability – Different cultures have different references, and sometimes analogies that work well in one place are not easily understandable elsewhere. You want your document – within reason of course – to appeal to the broadest audience possible.
  • Grammar – While not looking to change your style, there are many basic mistakes (such as capitalization of the wrong thing, possessives, etc.) that many get wrong and go unchecked until a formal edit when these things become much more magnified. Go into your formal edits with things in much better shape.
  • Flow – Are things logically laid out or is it a jumbled mess? If you confuse Allan, your readers will be as well.
  • Goals – Are you delivering what you are intending or being asked to do? Does your document tell the whole story or did you leave out key plot holes?

The point here is to deal with problems earlier. When you’re writing a paper or chapter (or even a PPT for a presentation) that will be reviewed or seen by multiple people, much like doing sanity checks on your servers before you install SQL Server, you want to make sure things are correct and on the right path because having to do large scale revisions is much more costly as time goes on. You don’t want to have to fix flow and content issues when you’re already supposed to be published. The reviews can be simple or a more formal tech review. The document doesn’t even need to be about SQL Server, Windows, clustering, etc. – we can help you on any topic.

In addition to reviewing, SQLHA can provide editing services for your document to take it that extra step further. It allows us to be much more interactive and hands on with you to shape your end result into something everyone will like.

If you’re not an individual author but a corporation or publisher looking to have your document (of any kind) reviewed or edited, we can help you out as well.

Put Allan’s years of experience to work for you. Contact us for pricing and availability.