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Setting Expectations for an Edit

A question I’m often asked is, “Authors can be confused by what kind of editing their manuscript needs. How do you handle that? Whenever an author reaches out to me, I ask them a bit about their past experience – have they published before, and if so, did they have a traditional publisher or did…

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Editorial terms and their meanings

When I talk about the author’s work of addressing areas of concern, I call it revision to distinguish it from what an editor does, which is editing. Most people writing and speaking on the subject don’t distinguish between the two but since I write a lot about the interaction between the editorial process and the authorial process, I…

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Editing for Different Stages of Ability

It’s important for editors to recognize that authors have different stages of ability: Most of our author clients are at Stage 1, 2, or 3, and how we shape the edit will depend on which it is. If we expect an author at Stage 1 to be able to spot their own errors, we aren’t…

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Using Book Reviews to Practice Developmental Editing

To get better at developmental editing you have to do developmental editing! But it’s not always easy to figure out how to go about that. Previously I’ve talked about being a beta reader as a way to gain practice as a DE. And, the self-paced Naked Editing class allows you to follow along as an…