No AI Editing. Human Editors Only.
The hard case is not a machine-written draft. It’s a draft written by a person which is then smoothed by a rewrite tool. We consider that file generated, since it’s no longer entirely theirs.
What the No AI Editing Policy Covers
Editing is where the division blurs, so we can be more specific about the button. Rewrite this paragraph, make this more concise, improve the flow, change the tone to friendly, expand this section, summarize this for the intro, result in sentences being composed. Accepting the result places text generated by a program into the document, regardless of what the feature may be called.
The permitted side is useful, and there is a degree of genuine narrowness. A red line indicating a misspelled word, a grammar check bringing attention to a missing comma, a score assessing the text for clarity and ease of reading, a word count, a house style guide, and a find-and-replace tool. None of these tools create written text. Our editors use these tools after doing the editing, not as a substitute for doing the editing.
Where a tool is a combination of the two, the combined tool is acceptable, and the generative portion is not. Word, Google Docs, Notion, and Grammarly all include a spell-checking feature alongside a rewriting feature. Editors keep the spell-checking tool and leave the rewriting feature shut, and an editor who cannot discern which is which is not ready to work with client content.
- Rewrite, rephrase or improve suggestions accepted into the draft
- Tools that adjust tone, voice, or reading level.
- Machine expansion of thin sections or condensation of lengthy sections.
- Generated introductions, conclusions, summaries, or transitional phrases.
- Auto-generated headings, meta descriptions or pull quotes
Allowed, because it composes nothing
Many of you use tools for spell checking, grammar, style, and even readability. Needless to say, this is not the only test this policy will put sentences through.
How the No AI Editing Policy Applies to Revisions
Two revision rounds come with every order and remain open for 14 days. A round involves a person reading your comments, deciding what to change, and writing the changes by hand. This is why a revision takes hours instead of the second it would take an AI to do the same, and this is the honest reason we cannot offer same day turnaround on changes.
Typically, revisions go back to the writer of the original draft, since they still have the research and the rationale behind the choices they want to modify. If said writer is genuinely unavailable, the brief, sources and draft history go to another writer, and we inform you of this, as opposed to the voice shifting without prior notification.
Some requests are better suited to rewrites than they are to revisions, and we will indicate as such, if and when we spend your revisions. If the brief changes after you’ve read the draft, it can be a waste of time to patch the old structure. In these cases, we’d give you a quote for a rewrite at $10 per 100 words, and you can use your unused revisions for the new piece.
- Send comments by email; there is no account or portal to log into
- The original writer picks the work up wherever that is possible
- Changes are rewritten by hand, never passed through a tool
- The revised file is re-checked and the reports are resent
- Two rounds included, usable any time inside 14 days
Why the No AI Editing Policy Protects Original Voice
Tools built on the concept of averaging will bring content down to an average, as that is what they were made to do. Take a tool one of these systems and feed it a sentence with an unconventional rhythm. You will then receive the standard version of that thought. If you run the tool across the entire document, all the unique aspects of that document that made the writing worth commissioning will disappear. Oddly phrased interviews, frank sentences, etc, will all disappear.
Hedges are the toughest to rewrite. Writing that is careful often contains many load bearing qualifiers, and rewrite tools seem to treat them as a kind of unnecessary redundancy. A lot of early rewrites replace Early results suggest with Results show, may reduce with reduces, and a sentence your compliance team signed off on becomes a claim it never approved. People reading the drafts do not pick it up because they see the new version is an improvement over what they read previously.
The commercial cost is less involved than the legal cost, and it is much more prevalent. When several companies in the same industry smooth their writing in the same way, the writing converges on a single cadence, a single collection of connectives, a single form of sentence. What is called ‘voice’ is a big part of what a person is compensated for, and taking a rewrite pass is the cheapest way to lose it.
- Instead of being standardized out, odd phrasing survives.
- Qualifiers are left unchanged, the way the writer and your reviewers left them.
- Quotations preserve the actual wording used by the source.
- Domain words are not replaced with more familiar synonyms.
- Notes related to your brand voice are adhered to by a person who read them.
The compliance case
If your copy passes a legal or medical review, a generative edit after sign-off puts unapproved wording into an approved document. Human editing keeps the version history a reviewer can effectively follow.
No AI Editing Policy FAQs
This program has a feature that lets you choose to mechanically correct text, but bans choosing to automatically generate it. So a checker that underlines misspelled words or an extra/missing comma is fine. The automatic rewrite of the other service is not, and accepting a suggestion would place computer-made text in your document.
A human editor reads the draft against the brief and each cited source. They verify the facts of substance and make corrections by writing over the sections themselves. Both the writer and the editor are recorded on the order.
You have full control of delivery and can do as you please. However, as a reminder, we would say that a rewrite will impact the readings of the detectors we shared with you, so if you are going to base your decisions on those reports, you should leave our delivered file the only version available.
Of course, we are the same as a human editing service, with the same rules. We assign a member of our team to read and edit your draft by hand. We are honest with you when a draft needs rewriting as opposed to editing. Charging for an editing service that cannot remedy the actual problems will not be beneficial for you or us.
It does. Proofreading means a person reading it to find errors whereas formatting means a person applying your style guide. Both involve a person and neither involve a tool that composes. Both have the same guarantee and detection check as original writing.
The writer asks rather than assumes. If your comments look like they are going against the brief we worked on, the editor sends you a quick email asking you a one sentence question instead of spending a round on it, as a revision meant to fix the wrong target takes one of the two you have.
None of this eliminates the need for human editing. People miss typos, debate commas, and even occasionally return a sentence that would have benefited from more work. We have picked a profession where we get a file that someone has clearly spent time on, and has checked their sources, over a file that is smoothed over by software that in the end, nobody will ever question.
Content a person actually wrote
$10 per 100 words, and the writer keeps all of it. Our 1% sits on top, 0.5% goes to trees, and no generated text appears anywhere in the process.