Certified Professional Editor

I recently received a letter from the Editors Association of Canada informing me that I’ve passed the last of my exams and successfully earned the right to put the letters CPE after my name: I’m a certified professional editor. The copy itself was very clean, so I sent it back to them with only a few stylistic suggestions.

Joking aside, I now have a widely recognized professional credential as an editor. What might seem a bit strange is that I’ve already edited thousands of pages of text for dozens of clients. That would seem to make me a professional editor by any reasonable definition. The key in this case is the “certified” part.