Editors help readers pay attention to writers’ ideas. Flawed writing keeps the audience from understanding its message. Referees at journals, for instance, may overlook your argument's merits if your manuscript is not well composed. So it’s helpful to have a professional look at your writing with fresh eyes and pay careful attention to it.

Stylistic editors live to make your writing flow well at the level of the sentence, paragraph, and section. Copy editors make it more clear, consistent, concise, complete, and grammatically correct.  We cut out clichés. We make awkward phrases more elegant. We have a sense of whether a name or date should be fact checked. We make sure words and phrases are used properly.

When the copy editing is done, proofreaders make a final pass to make sure the writing is free of errors in punctuation, capitalization, spelling, hyphenation, and numerals, as determined by the preferred style guide.

The indexer steps in just before publication and creates a network of terms and names to give the reader a hand in finding and returning to the concepts and persons of most interest to them.

Consider giving your writing the best chance of making it into print and having its intended effect by putting it in the hands of a knowledgeable and experienced publishing professional.