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Gain a quick understanding of what our Editorial Team can and cannot fix or change in your article. 
How far-reaching is the power of an EzineArticles Editor? Do you need to be concerned that they may change the actual content of your article?
The answer is no. As a matter of fact, there are many limitations on just what an editor can change. And those changes are designed to only improve the grammatical, structural and readability qualities of your articles.
What EzineArticles Editors CAN Fix or Change in your Article:
- Punctuation– Editors can fix or add punctuation and tweak minor errors in the wording within an article.
- Spelling – Editors are expected to make sure that all the words in an article are spelled properly.
- Common Usage Errors – Editors must look out for frequent author word misuse such as “loose” and “lose”, “their” and “there”, or “your” and “you’re”.
- Minor Sentence Structure – Editors may also change the punctuation in sentences by adding commas, periods, and capitalizing words. For example, an editor may break a run on sentence into two sentences by adding a period and capitalizing the next word. Editors may NOT move the pieces of a sentence around or take out content to make it sound better.
- Minor Words – Editors can change only minor words within an article title or body. For example, it is okay to add or remove a “the” or “a”. It is also permissible to change a word to the correct tense.
- Formatting – Editors ensure that the article is attractive and easy to read – articles should be in paragraphs and have proper spacing/bullet points.
What Editors CANNOT Change:
- Content or meaning of a title or article. “Content” is the informative or creative material that authors submit in their articles. For example, if the article’s title is “5 Tips for Buying a Home” and the author lists 7 tips, the editor CANNOT take out the 5 and replace it with a 7. That would be changing content by taking it away. Now if the same title said “5 Tips for Buying Home”, the editor CAN add the word “a” to make it grammatically correct.
- Major Sentence Stucture – Editors are also not allowed to take out parts of the article or change sentence structure around.
- Major Words – Editors may not take out words or sections of a title or article.
- Title Word Order – Editors cannot change the word order in an article title.
- Keywords or Links – Editors may not take out keywords or links. (Anchor text links may only be taken out if a specific set of criteria are met.)
Our editors are typically not allowed to remove content – though sometimes editors can move minor items around, such as reposition a copyright to the bottom of the article. Essentially, the content of your article will always remain the same.
An editor changing content within your articles is considered taboo here at EzineArticles. We understand that you are entrusting us with your material and we want to validate that trust by never overstepping our editorial boundaries. Our job is to make you look good.
EzineArticles Editors are NOT a replacement for:
- Spellchecker Software
- Language Proficiency
- Good Writing Habits
- Proofreading
- Peer or Friend Reviews
- Developing Your Writing Skills
Poor quality articles will not only slow down the review process, they will also flag you as a less-than-ideal author. Repeat quality offenders can have their accounts downgraded, suspended or removed from the site. So take the extra time to ensure that your article is as good as it can be before hitting that “Submit” button and we’ll do our part to double-check your work before it gets published on EzineArticles.com. When in doubt, consult the Editorial Guidelines.
Tom,
We feared even sharing today’s blog post with hopes that our members wouldn’t begin to lean on us as their Editorial department.
Some day we may develop a Premium level of service that will include full editorial service. Until then, we’re not setup to notify you when we make minor edits to improve your articles.
One way to track it if you’d like is to save a copy of your original article in a word doc; Grab the final approved article after it goes live and do a merge/compare to highlight any differences.
September 29, 2009 at 7:32 PM[Reply]
Chris,
I had anticipated your answer, but you never know until you ask.
I will start doing that with my articles so I can improve my editing ability and hopefully reduce the load on your editors.
I have seen several requests from EzineArticles for ways that you can help us. Being new to the process I’m probably asking old questions but …
Do you have any articles in your archive about how to select the proper title? I feel that I am failing to attract attention to some articles because the title is not attention grabbing.
Can you point us in the direction of articles or blog comments that can help us increase the clicks to our profile and my links?
What is the best way to attract an emagazine or even regular magazine to EzineArticles? Do you have any experience as to whether that even happens?
Is there a restriction on my ability to publish my articles in places other then EzineArticles if I have them published here?
If I have something on my blog can I cut and paste it unchanged into an article and vice versa?
You guys are awesome and I really appreciate this opportunity.
September 29, 2009 at 10:28 PM[Reply]
Tom,
Article Titles:
Attn grabbing is 2nd to making sure you have a primary and secondary keyword in your article title that directly relates to a benefit or a promise of a benefit your article body will deliver on.
Study all of these free resources:
http://EzineArticles.com/training/
You can submit articles to us that you own and wrote even if you have them published elsewhere. We only require that your articles are unique to you …which means we must not be able to find your articles elsewhere on the Internet under no name or someone else’s name.
Lastly, give this 10-20 minutes of study before your next article submission:
September 30, 2009 at 10:16 AMhttp://www.EzineArticles.com/editorial-guidelines.html
[Reply]
Tom,
One thing I would add to Chris’ response is to use the power of our blog search to get your questions answered.
If you look in the upper right corner of the blog page, you’ll see a Search field right below Christopher’s smiling face. That search is restricted to just the blog – so you can use it to quickly find posts on all of your questions, both present and future.
September 30, 2009 at 10:47 AM[Reply]