Making content make sense

Most content today is made using a combination of human expertise and digital tools.

You probably use AI already to search for data, set out drafts and restructure ideas. That can make writing faster and easier, but it can also introduce mistakes that are surprisingly hard to catch.

Writefish provides a human in the loop, for your drafts or your final product. Traditionally, this sort of work has been called substantive editing, copyediting and proofreading, but I like to think of it as follows.

Style checking

Does it follow the rules?

Good content is consistent. Thousands of small details add up, and getting them right makes content easier to read and trust.

I can check your material against the Australian Government Style Manual, your organisation’s style guide or an agreed set of conventions. This includes spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalisation, numbers, headings, lists, terminology, tone and plain language.

AI tools are good at producing clean-looking text. They’re less reliable at applying a particular style consistently across a large document. The big problem for content creators now is: How would you know?

Sense checking

Does it make sense?

Sometimes every sentence works but the document doesn’t. A thought over here might contradict a claim from 50 pages ago. A conclusion might not follow from the evidence. This is where human judgement matters.

I can analyse your content in context and look for gaps, contradictions, oddities and things that simply don’t add up.

Fact checking

Is it actually true?

AI can help you to find, organise and explain information. It can also introduce a wrong date, an invented source, an inaccurate quotation or a confident statement that turns out to be made up.

Humans can miss those things too, but experienced editors like me have an intuitive sense for what doesn’t stack up, even if it sounds plausible. I’ll look for reliable sources and flag claims that appear incorrect, unsupported, out of date or unverifiable.

Human in the loop

Making content make sense

The best modern content workflows combine human knowledge with useful technology, but the trap is assuming that the technology gets everything right. Someone (a human) still needs to read carefully, understand the context and recognise the difference between something that sounds plausible and something that is actually correct.

These are the traditional editing and proofreading tasks, and technology has made them more important than ever. You can’t hit ‘publish’ without a human in the loop.

Rates and costs

See the rates page for a discussion of project rates, costs and estimates.