Hiring an editor is no substitute for doing your own editing.

But once you revise, you may want to call on the services of a professional who has mastered the skill of editing, which is not the same as writing. A good editor will bring out your ideas in your own voice.

Many of the greatest works of literature exist in their current form only because of an editor. The Great Gatsby is a famous example. F. Scott Fitzgerald decided that he would write it more carefully than he had written his previous books, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, which were both commercial successes. He ended up discarding most of his early drafts. When he did send a manuscript to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Perkins told him that the novel was vague, and Fitzgerald spent the next winter revising it.

Editing is no guarantee of commercial success. The Great Gatsby sold many fewer copies than Fitzgerald’s earlier books after it appeared in 1925. Two decades later, during World War II, the Army gave away copies of the novel to US soldiers, and Gatsby began to take its place as one of the greatest American books.

Scott Fitzgerald had huge talent. But he knew that to produce lasting work, he needed to revise more and to heed his editor, Maxwell Perkins.

A copy-editor will polish your prose, correcting punctuation and stylistic or grammatical errors. Maxwell Perkins gave Fitzgerald a critique. A critique includes useful comments on how your manuscript could strike different readers. It may offer suggestions on how you might make it more effective. If you are writing a speech or article, you want to be clear, eloquent,  focused and persuasive. In a novel, you need characters and a plot that will hold the reader’s attention from beginning to end.