A Lesson Learned

Okay, I just finished my first official assignment from my new client. I’m working with a company that edits manuscripts written by non-native English language speakers and intended for English language scientific journals. Sounds good, right? Yeah, it will be, once I figure out how to estimate how hard a particular editing project will be!

I spent about 30 minutes looking through the introduction of the manuscript to try and determine the difficulty level of the editing job. Getting this right is important, because that difficulty level is what I base my fee on. The intro looked pretty good, so I estimated a mid-range difficulty level. I really should have looked through the methods, too. Oh. My. God. It took me 10 hours (over three days!) to slog through the whole thing!

I really lost some money on this one. Oh, well. I guess I’ll have to consider it a lesson learned and move on, now won’t I?