The Editing Process
What an editor does to your manuscript and why
An editor's job is to polish a manuscript to make what the author is trying to say the best it can be. Part of this job might include helping authors figure out what they want to communicate and what their intent is.
Editing at any level requires judgement, and there are guidelines and methods to follow. Editing is not black and white, but it is also not arbitrary. The book remains the author’s, and the author always has the right to accept or reject any changes or to query the editor and receive an explanation as to the rationale behind the editor’s decisions.
It's important to communicate well with your editor so she can find out where you're coming from and where you want to go. The more you can tell your editor about your vision and goals for your book, the better she can help you achieve them.
Editing at any level requires judgement, and there are guidelines and methods to follow. Editing is not black and white, but it is also not arbitrary. The book remains the author’s, and the author always has the right to accept or reject any changes or to query the editor and receive an explanation as to the rationale behind the editor’s decisions.
It's important to communicate well with your editor so she can find out where you're coming from and where you want to go. The more you can tell your editor about your vision and goals for your book, the better she can help you achieve them.
Structural and Stylistic Editing—the Big Picture
The two main criteria I use to help guide me in structural editing decisions are the author’s vision for his work and readers’ expectations. So if you are writing a literary novel and want to bend form or grammar rules for effect, I will work within your unique style and voice. But if you are losing your reader, I will need to make some suggestions and corrections to your manuscript.
Confusion and boredom are two common reasons for losing a reader’s interest. A how-to book needs clear instructions to follow. A mystery story needs to keep us guessing until the end. If you are writing a novel, it’s easy to lose a reader with inconsistencies or muddled facts. Highly stylistic works might need some specialized text treatments to sort figurative elements from the main narrative.
Boredom in a reader can be caused by many factors including repetition, lack of focus, and passive characters. Whether fiction or nonfiction, your book needs to keep your audience’s interest. Without the reader’s engagement, your book’s purpose is lost.
The suggestions I make in a manuscript evaluation are to gain the following results:
Confusion and boredom are two common reasons for losing a reader’s interest. A how-to book needs clear instructions to follow. A mystery story needs to keep us guessing until the end. If you are writing a novel, it’s easy to lose a reader with inconsistencies or muddled facts. Highly stylistic works might need some specialized text treatments to sort figurative elements from the main narrative.
Boredom in a reader can be caused by many factors including repetition, lack of focus, and passive characters. Whether fiction or nonfiction, your book needs to keep your audience’s interest. Without the reader’s engagement, your book’s purpose is lost.
The suggestions I make in a manuscript evaluation are to gain the following results:
- make your book work better as a whole
- avoid losing your reader in confusion
- avoid losing your reader with a lack of momentum
- keep your unique voice and vision for what you want to say
- communicate this and appeal to a general audience
Copyediting and Proofreading—the Final Polish
Even at a sentence level, editing requires judgement. Language is complex, and grammatical errors can be addressed in various ways. If an editor doesn’t focus on maintaining the author’s unique style, the text can sound mechanical and the author’s voice lost.
I like to be conservative with my copyediting, using the same criteria as when editing structural issues. If your particular style choice is confusing the reader, I will correct only what is necessary to make what you want to say and how you want to say it clear and effective.
I use The Chicago Manual of Style 16th Edition to guide me in the latest stylistic choices of editing to ensure correctness, consistency, and clarity in your book.
Track Changes
I use Track Changes in MS Word to edit. You can accept, reject, or query any of my changes with the click of a button. All the changes are clearly marked in red, and any queries or comments are marked in a bubble in the margin.
I will send you back two copies of your manuscript. One will be a clean copy with all the changes accepted, and the other will have all the editing marks and comments. The easiest way to review an edited manuscript is to read the clean text and refer to the document with marked changes whenever you have a question.
© Marie Dvorak
I like to be conservative with my copyediting, using the same criteria as when editing structural issues. If your particular style choice is confusing the reader, I will correct only what is necessary to make what you want to say and how you want to say it clear and effective.
I use The Chicago Manual of Style 16th Edition to guide me in the latest stylistic choices of editing to ensure correctness, consistency, and clarity in your book.
Track Changes
I use Track Changes in MS Word to edit. You can accept, reject, or query any of my changes with the click of a button. All the changes are clearly marked in red, and any queries or comments are marked in a bubble in the margin.
I will send you back two copies of your manuscript. One will be a clean copy with all the changes accepted, and the other will have all the editing marks and comments. The easiest way to review an edited manuscript is to read the clean text and refer to the document with marked changes whenever you have a question.
© Marie Dvorak
