Elena Barza

I am a skilled professional proofreader. I pride myself on my great attention to detail and diligence to get the job well done.

I love the English language. I have devoted half of my life to the study of it. By my early teens, I have already passed the Examination for the Certificate of Proficiency in English by the University of Michigan. I continued on by studying for five years English language and literature in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. When I graduated, I finalized my decision to become a freelance proofreader and took complementary training by completing the Generalized Proofreading course by Proofread Anywhere.

Common to misconception, proofreading and copyediting are not one and the same. I have decided to specialize in proofreading since that is where my true passion lies.

I will polish your texts to perfection by looking for grammatical, spelling, punctuation, and syntactical errors, as well as formatting issues. Proofreading is the last scan of the text before it gets published. I look for those pesky mistakes that are easy to be overlooked. However, what I will not do is: I will not rewrite/reformulate the content/structure of your text so that its readability is bettered. I will not fact-check your text in terms of its content. What I am looking for to fix is the "outer" layer of the text, in terms of grammaticality and technicality.

*However, considering my lengthy educational background on the English language, if I deem that I can take on some light content editing for a specific project, I will state so in my job application. I have had plenty of practice from preparing for my ECPE in my younger years to academic work in university later on. I believe that should the need arise, I can make a competent editor for specific contexts as well.

I have a lot of experience and work with CMOS, but I can adapt to specific house style guides, should I need to. In that case, I will depend on good communication with you to determine and deliver on your preferences. Furthermore, as far as register goes to, I proofread in American English.

In addition, I've always loved typing. Lately, I have discovered copy typing and I am looking forward to taking on projects that will help me advance further on that. My typing speed is around 75 wpm.

What is the most important to me is delivering on your specific needs and making sure that they are met 100 percent. Apart from that, I am a perfectionist; for me, it is a given that I will give it my all to deliver high-quality results for you.