About Me

 

My main trade for the last 45 years has been in the IT/computing industry, holding a number of senior technical positions with large enterprises, both in the public and private sectors and also both as a permanent employee and a self-employed consultant. Even though the majority of the work has been technical, there was also a substantial amount of reviewing and editing of system designs and documentation, which often spanned hundreds of pages and were highly technical in nature. My role for these documents was pretty much as a copy-editor and involved the following skills:

  • Reviewing the technical content and suggesting improvements so that the text was more suitable for the intended audience
  • Spotting and correcting typos and spelling errors
  • Spotting and correcting issues relating to grammar and punctuation
  • Correcting instances where the wrong words have been used, e.g. there/their/they're, to/too/two, where/were/wear etc
  • Reviewing sentence construction and improving the wording of sentences and paragraphs
  • Suggesting changes to ensure the text flowed logically and enhanced readability
  • Reviewing displayed material such as images/captions, tables and lists
  • Reviewing the document(s) for overall consistency, layout, formatting and appearance.

I contributed more than 500 hours to the editing tasks described above, so I have some valuable experience in copyediting, without having actually worked in a formal copy-editor role.

While I was in full time employment as an IT consultant, I also worked as a freelance author, contributing author and technical editor/reviewer for several publishers in the US. These included:

  • Author of two technical books with NewRiders Publishing and QUE Publishing (each around 350 pages)
  • Contributing author of two technical books with QUE Publishing (each around 800-900 pages)
  • Technical editor/reviewer of eight technical books with Macmillan Technical Publishing, NewRiders Publishing, QUE Publishing and Prentice Hall Publishing (some up to 1000 pages).

Please see the author page for details of the books I have written, the contributing author page for books I worked on as the contributing author and the technical editor page for books where I was the technical editor/reviewer.

 

My focus for the last 1–2 years has been to gain the formal qualifications required to be a professional proofreader and editor.

I believe that you never stop learning and I actively pursue a dynamic programme of Continuing Professional Development to not only keep up with advances in technology and techniques, but also to extend my capabilities through additional training.

 

John Philcox - January 2025