What is Developmental Editing?
Developmental editors used to be key roles built into publishing houses — at both academic and trade presses — but, in a trend that will shock none of you, publishing houses have pushed the cost and labor of developmental editing onto authors over the decades.
You’re probably thinking, but publishing houses and journals still have editors, right? Acquisition editors source manuscripts, and copyeditors make sure the manuscript is proofread, indexed, and formatted for the printer, but everything else (as you may have already noticed) is up to you.
Below are the different levels of editing so you can understand how a developmental editor and writing coach can contribute to your scholarship and be a secret weapon during your academic career.
Level 1: Proofreading
Proofreading is what your teachers asked you to do before you turned in book reports and essays in school so you could catch any typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and formatting issues you may have missed. Proofreading is a quick polish and comes last in the revision process.
Level 2: Copyediting
A step above proofreading is copyediting, which is focused on cleaning up the mechanics of a piece of writing so that it aligns with all the spelling, grammar, punctuation, style, and citation rules of a particular format (e.g., APA, MLA).
Level 3: Line Editing
A step up from copyediting is line-editing, which is a closer look at how you express ideas at the sentence level. Line editing seeks to improve the clarity, style, tone, word choice, and overall flow of your writing, and comes after higher-level editing and re-structuring.
Level 4: Content Editing
Content editing moves us away from just the sentence level, formatting, and rule-following, and looks at a piece of writing as a whole and seeks to improve its overall clarity, argument, and organization. Content editing makes sure that your main idea is a clear throughline, that you develop and support it effectively, and that your tone and style are consistent and appropriate for your target audience.
Level 5: Developmental Editing
Developmental editing is an in-depth evaluation of the big picture and the finer details of your writing piece. Your editor works with you as you develop your ideas, argument, and structure, and takes on more significant revisions (i.e., recommending the rearrangement, rewriting, addition, or deletion of larger portions of text) as the project continues. The editor alternates between a 30,000-foot view and a detail-oriented view to ensure that larger-scale things (e.g., your chapter/section structure, how you make the case for your thesis throughout) and smaller-scale things (e.g., your word choice; your tables, figures, or other images; and your citations) all work together to serve the goals of your piece and meet your audience where they are.
Developmental editing often begins when your writing project begins, to get the project off to a focused and planful start. Developmental editing can also begin later in the process, after you hit a wall, get frustrated, or receive feedback you’re unsure how to deal with. The professional relationship between a writer and a developmental editor is a collaborative one that includes independent work on both sides, as well as regular working conversations.
Level 4: Writing Coaching
One responsibility of a quality developmental editor is writing coaching. A writing coach can help you clarify your goals and identify your pain points, and, from there, develop personalized strategies and offer ongoing accountability and support throughout the writing and publication processes. Both developmental editors and writing coaches can be project managers for an article or a book, working with you to break down a bigger project into smaller chunks, to establish internal and mutual deadlines, and to talk through ideas and work through problems as they arise.