English-language game editing

Intro

Do you know the difference between “login” and “log in”?
What about rules concerning semicolons, colons, em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens?

These are, of course, not the important parts of your game. However, knowing what the rules are (and when to let them slide) will give your game an overall more polished impression with players.

The good news? You can outsource this task! This is where the services of McWrite Editing come into play: for a negotiated payment scheme or editing credit, you can offload the more arcane parts of polishing your game's writing, allowing you to concentrate your time and energy on making the best game you can.

My attention to detail can bring the same level of quality to your writing that you have spent countless hours to produce with the rest of your game. Let me help you!

Continue on to see the editing process details.

Details

So, what does this process look like?

1. What particulars you want concerning grammar/spelling (technical comma conventions are not exactly what you'd want in a narratively driven game),
2. Whether you want broader editing suggestions beyond just spelling/grammar (such as word choice and alternative phrasing), and
3. What style guide and spelling system you prefer (i.e. Chicago style, Canadian English).

If you're unsure as to the answer to these questions, no worries! I'll talk them through with you.

You can expect me to cover rare, proscribed, or inconsistent spelling and punctuation, as well as any extreme instances of stilted or weak language.

For the actual editing process, the standard routine is as follows: once we've worked out the above details I will do several pass-throughs of the script (or a few, in the event I'm actually playing the game) and return suggested edits. I will field questions/clarifications/feedback, then incorporate those to create a final set of changes/lines for the team.

This editing process is subject to change during price negotiations. For indie creators and smaller teams, I offer these services for free with attribution. Please check out pricing for more details on this.

Additional Services

I do cover archaic or dated English spelling and grammar conventions as well (i.e., Early Modern English conjugation, the subjunctive mood, etc.). Pre-1600 you should expect increasingly diminished accuracy of this from me, however. (This is fairly niche—Shakespeare's plays date from the 1590s, for context. Prior to this point the English language rapidly becomes less standardized/consistent.)

Example edits

“Romeo and Juliet went to setup camp, they often had hangouts like this. They liked being apart of nature and appreciated it's affects.”

1. “setup” (a noun) should be “set up” (a verb). This is because *setup would be a defective verb; the natural conjugation for it is “setting up,” not “setupping”.
2. “camp, they” should be “camp; they” or “camp. They”. Commas are too weak a separation to be used for splitting independent clauses.
3. “apart of nature” should be “a part of nature”. “apart of nature” actually means away from nature, although between the dated nature of that construction and context it would still be understandable here.
4. “it's” should be “its”. While the apostrophe normally indicates possession (the genitive case), in the case of “it”, “it's” is reserved exclusively for the contraction “it is”.
5. “affects” should be “effects”. The general rule of thumb here is that you affect (verb) effects (noun), although there is a common verb sense of “effect” and a niche noun sense of “affect,” as well.

Some of these examples might feel contrived, but they are fairly common and can appear even in big-budget games. The “setup” error shows prominently in the recent AAA title Age of Empires IV, for instance, with the Longbowmen ability.

Pricing

1. Small-scale tier (free assistance to qualified independent studios)
2. Premium tier (USD or CAD, designed for larger projects with financial backing)

1. In the event no changes are used, you reserve the right to reject both my services and the terms of service.
2. The phrase “D. Estes McKnight (McWrite Editing)” or some equivalent appears somewhere in the credits in whatever the standard credits font is.
3. I am allowed to advertise the game on the McWrite Editing webpage as an example of prior work.

For the unpaid tier, I additionally reserve the right to ask that my name be removed from the credits (largely in case additional changes are made and newer versions of the game do have errors). This tier is available to, for example, low-budget indie creators or game jam creators who either lack money to spare or have little expectation of making substantial money from their game.

For the paid tier, the price is negotiable and on a per-game basis. The standard routine is that I edit part of the game's script (or play part of the game) to determine how much time portions of the larger script/game will take, then return a cost estimate to allow you to decide whether to retain my services or not; however, this is very open to conversation.

You can contact me to discuss my services directly, or you can see more information about me.

About Me

Hello! My name is D. McKnight (they/she). Welcome to the website for my editing services!

I am an M.Sc. Candidate in Computing Science at the University of Alberta in Canada researching natural language processing and machine learning. Prior to this, I attended the University of Oklahoma, where I completed a B.Sc. in Mathematics and a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering with a minor in Computer Science. In ye olden times I lived in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

My hobbies include reading about languages, playing games with friends, and reading about games in a variety of senses (which for better or worse seems to happen more often than actually playing them nowadays). A niche interest of mine is video game music, including listening to it, organizing interest in it/its composers, and archiving it. Hit me up for some recommendations, if you so desire! My favorite soundtracks are those of Chrono Trigger (Yasunori Mitsuda) and Radiant Historia (Yoko Shimomura, of Kingdom Hearts fame); I'm also a big fan of a variety of more obscure stuff though (check out this SNES track from Dean Evans)!

For more information about my professional background, you can refer to my résumé/CV. You can reach out to me for my services here.

Contact

Elements

i = 0;

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    print 'Iteration ' + i;
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    i++;
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