Our Methods

Our Style and Preferences

Our Rates

Our Top Language Pet Peeves

Once you've decided that you need a word cure, just contact us, and we'll explain in detail how it all works. Here, briefly, is some information that will help you get your materials and ideas in order, and know what to expect from us:

Five Easy Steps to a Word Cure:

1) Send your document, or a few sample pages of your document, to us in order to get a quote on your project. We prefer that you send your texts as e-mail attachments (in Microsoft Word or WordPerfect format), or point us to a URL. You can also fax or mail a hard copy to us, but keep in mind that faxed, hard copies, or e-mailed PDF files take longer to format and re-write, so your costs will be higher than with a text that is easily manipulated within a word processing programme.

2) Once we take a look at your document, we will give you a quote on your project as soon as possible, with an estimated completion time (if you have not specified a deadline). Our rates are hourly, but the quote that we give you will be your final cost, no matter how much time we go over or under our estimate. If you submit substantial changes or additions to your project during the work time, we reserve the right to submit a new quote before completion of the project.
Note: If you require a rush job (i.e., work completed in under 48 hours), a surcharge of 20% may be added to our regular rate.

3) You must accept the quote and give approval by signing the Standard Editorial Agreement before we can proceed. If you are working with a very tight deadline, we suggest that you give approval as soon as possible, as any delay will affect the estimated completion time.
Note: At our discretion, we may require a 20% deposit before we begin work.

4) Upon completion of the work, we e-mail or fax to you your original version, with revision marks and comments. The marked version is always submitted so that you can see what kind of work we did on your text, and you can decide what (if any) changes you wish to keep.

5) We're not satisfied unless you are! You tell us if the work that we've done is acceptable, and sign an Acceptance of Services Agreement. Only then do we ask for final payment.

Any changes that we submit to you, are of course, suggestions—you can love the new version and keep it, or implement none of the changes at all. To give you an idea of how we write or edit, here's a brief overview of

Our Style and Preferences:

1) We really prefer Canadian (British) spelling over American spelling, and will write or correct your texts accordingly, using our dictionary of choice, the Canadian Oxford. However, if it's very obvious that your targeted audience is American, or you just prefer American spelling, just let us know.

2) We will impose a consistent style on your document, using APA style, The Chicago Manual of Style, or any other style that you choose.

3) We like consistency, and will point out the small details. If your margins are mis-aligned from one paragraph to another, or you're employing four different font sizes on the same page (without meaning to), we'll spend our time fixing up little things like these.

4) We spell "e-mail" and "on-line" with a hypen, we capitalise "Internet", and we write out "web site" and "web page" as two words. That's just our preference on the spelling of Internet terms. However, if you prefer your own ways of spelling, let us know, before we take our red pen to everything.

If you want to get a better idea of how we would edit and correct, check out our top language pet peeves below.

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Our Rates

We charge hourly rates* that are within industry standards. We will give you a quote on your project, based on our estimation of how long it will take us. Please note that if you submit substantial changes or additions to your project during the work time, we reserve the right to submit a new quote to you before completion of the project.

Our work is done when you are satisfied. Once you have accepted the final work and signed off on the Acceptance of Services Agreement, all fees are non-refundable.

Rush Jobs
If you require a rush job (i.e. work completed in under 48 hours), a surcharge of 20% may be added to our regular rate.

For a quote on your project, or to receive details of our rates, please contact us.

* Note: Rates may vary, depending on the complexity of the project. There is a one-hour minimum on all projects.

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Our Top Language Pet Peeves

To give you any idea of how we work, below are 10 of our biggest language pet peeves at the moment:

10- As noted above, the loss of adverbs. Please don't write in your annual report that "the company achieved its goals and did remarkable this year." It really gets our goat. Also, if you think that you write good, when you really should be writing well, then you should contact us.

9- Lack of hyphens. One of the funnier examples recently is the movie title "The Forty Year Old Virgin" (add an "s" onto the word "virgin", and see what you get). Don't make similarly embarrassing mistakes in your writing. Hyphens are tiny, but oh, so useful.

8- Improper use of, commas; and semi-colons; they should be corrected at all times.

7- Misuse of the apostrophe. Don't store signs like this bother you? "All winter coat's on sale!" Yeah, us too.

6- When Something Is Written All in Title Case Like This, Unnecessarily, It's A Little Annoying, Isn't It?

5- Redundancy in writing is a little bothersome to wade through. When people write that they want to "raise up their profit margin this year", we want to help them express it with a bit more finesse.

4- Ah, yes, the famous dangling modifier. "Walking into the conference room, the coffee smelled delicious" will be treated severely with our red pen.

3- Run-on sentences. When your product literature goes on and on with wordy descriptions and insufficient punctuation or breaks and the clauses just never seem to end then it's difficult for your customer to get through, isn't it?

2- Simple misspellings of common words still amaze us: "A lot" of words are spelled "alot", and when your department doesn't acknowledge "it's" mistakes, it can spell trouble for your professional image.

And our biggest language pet peeve:

1- Improper use of pronouns (sometimes due to over-correction). "Her and I finished the project together" is wrong. So is "The supervisor and myself came to this conclusion." So is "This decision is between you and I."
If you couldn't see what was wrong with any of those sentences, please, give us a call.

worddoctor@wordcure dot com | 905.447.3525 | Bowmanville ON, Canada

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