DEVELOPMENTAL EDITING

For clients wishing to go beyond a manuscript evaluation, and get into the I offer developmental editing. In this step of the process, I closely review individual chapter drafts and suggest modifications to prosody and structure on three levels, from macro, to medium, to micro level.

The macro level focuses on the entire argument of the chapter, which in real terms means that I’ll draft a new outline with clear topic headings and indications where to insert text that is already written. Here, you will likely also see suggestions for new sections to amplify, topic sentences, and supporting sentences. All this is done in the service of providing a template that is clear and easy to follow in rewriting.

The medium level focuses on the structure, integrity, and flow of individual paragraphs. Here, you may see reformulated topic sentences or supporting sentences in track changes. At this level, you will also see marginal comments on individual sentences or groups of sentences, proposing to move them to other parts in the essay, amplify them, or cut them altogether. In the marginal comments you may also see requests for clarification and/or inclusion of details particular to your argument which I as an outside reader cannot furnish.

The micro level employs a very granular approach to individual sentences and words, looking to render them more robust, direct, and simple. A lot of work done at this level regards strengthening subject-verb relationships, taming run-on sentences, curtailing excessive prepositional phrases, and completing sentences that appear fragmentary in some way. This level of work also involves proposals to move text around within the paragraph and to reformat topic sentences, always aiming to ensure that the flow of the discourse be as clear and direct as possible.

To recap, macro work involves a new proposed outline, medium work mostly takes the form of marginal comments guiding structure and flow within paragraphs, and micro work generally means rewrites in track changes meaning to fix sentences. Since all these three levels are linked, however, there is a degree of crossover between them.