Editing and copywriting

“Working with James was an absolute pleasure. He approached the project with total professionalism, handling multiple contributors and perspectives with ease. He was organised, communicative, and delivered everything on time—making what could have been a complex process feel smooth and efficient. His editorial input helped bring the magazine together seamlessly, and the end result speaks for itself. We wouldn’t hesitate to work with James again.”

- Publisher, The Ultimate Guide to Running a Driving Instructor Business

The Ultimate Guide to Running a Driving Instructor Business

The Brief

Intelligent Instructor, the UK’s leading publication for the driving instruction sector, needed help editing an informative guide to running a driving instructor business, ahead of its flagship annual conference, attended by 100s of driving instructors. In the word of the Publisher, time was “of the essence” after another editor had dropped out last minute.

I embarked on the challenge of coordinating article contributors, a designer and an advert sales team to turn around a 68-page magazine in just six weeks.

The Challenges

Aside from the tight deadline, the major challenge came in liaising with the contributors, many of whom were experts in their field but not journalists. Their contributions therefore varied from incoherent notes, to bullet-pointed lists, to articles that had quite clearly been written by AI, and my task was to turn these into polished prose.

Additionally, out of 40 pages of editorial, I had to write half of the content from scratch, with minimal prior knowledge of the sector

The Delivery

In short, I cracked on! I requested that all contributors send me content on their chosen subjects asap to give me time to filter through them and iron out any issues or questions. I spoke to a number of them to get clarification on certain points and sought approval from each of them on the final written pieces.

To get a better sense of key trends across the sector, I also undertook interviews with driving instructors, insurers, road safety specialists, driving association representatives, app developers, accountants, marketing experts, fleet trainers, and more, from which was able to draft additional articles.

The Results

  • 40 pages of editorial.

  • 13 articles from contributors, edited and proofread.

  • Ten interviews of industry experts.

  • 7,500 words of copy drafted from scratch.

  • Liaised with sales team and designer on constantly evolving flatplan to accommodate editorial, adverts and additional promotional materials.

  • The end product: a 68-page magazine, professionally produced and printed in time for the conference, as needed by the client!