Too Thorough
Sunday, July 24, 2016 at 4:36PM Recently, I received an email from a client, the gist of it being that my work was too thorough.
She didn’t come right out and say it that directly, but reading between the lines made the point.
The problem, I was told, was that I, in providing editing services, was finding and fixing too many types of problems, and that I should just focus on problems relating to spelling, grammar, punctuation, and the client’s style guide.
In my twenty-one years of editing professionally, this was the first time I’d ever been told that I was being too eagle-eyed, too detail-oriented, too … thorough.
The root cause of concern was the amount of the previous few invoices I had sent to the client for my editing services. The billed hours were straining the client’s budget and making it difficult for the client to control costs.
To me, the simplest solution to this client’s concern was this: tell your employees to search for and correct the simple problems in their documents before they are sent to me to edit. The fewer problems I find, the fewer hours I have to bill, and the lower the amount I have to charge.
I suggested this to the client, but based on the number of problems I found in the documents the following month, I concluded that the client was unable or unwilling to put this simple solution into action.
Despite not liking it, I have done as this client asked. I now confine my corrections to those involving spelling, grammar, punctuation, and style. Of course, I’m still spotting other types of problems as I work my way through the documents, but now, despite my instinctive drive to always do my best for my clients, I just ignore those other problems.
Despite the frustration, it has been a learning experience. I have learned that I can no longer assume that a client wants me to be thorough in my work. Each time a new client hires me, I ask them, “How thorough do you want me to be?” Six months ago, that would have been a silly, pointless question for me to ask a client, and might have even made me sound lazy. But I’ve learned that assuming I know the answer could be too much of an assumption.
PJW