For a scholarly writer, completing a draft of an article or book brings a great sense of accomplishment. Whether we are next passing our work to a supervisor, journal editor, book publisher or simply a colleague who has agreed to give us constructive feedback, we all secretly hope that our readers will find little to criticise.
But to be a truly accomplished writer, it’s important to understand and accept that editing one’s draft is part of the deal. Although it can be difficult for us writers to face the flaws in our early drafts, most great manuscripts don’t show up fully formed on the page in the first draft. As I say in my new book, Make Your Manuscript Work: A Guide to Developmental Editing for Scholarly Writers, having a manuscript in need of development doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. It simply means you’re a writer.
As a professional developmental editor for scholarly authors, the other truth about editing that I wish all writers understood is that “editing” isn’t just one thing. There are in fact multiple levels of editing, and all manuscripts must go through them all to achieve a result that’s highly effective with readers.
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The first and possibly least well-known level of editing is developmental editing. Developmental editing focuses on the biggest-picture aspects of how the writer’s ideas are presented in the text. In my book, I call these fundamental aspects of the text the four pillars of scholarly writing: argument, evidence, structure and the overall style in which the author approaches the subject matter and addresses the reader. These four pillars are foundational because a scholarly text will not stand up to scrutiny by publishers, peer reviewers or end readers if it has major weaknesses in any of these areas. Developmental editing to strengthen the four pillars of the text is therefore a crucial step in ensuring that a text achieves the writer’s intended results.
Following developmental editing comes line editing, copy editing and proofreading. Line editing is a more familiar process to most writers; if you’ve ever read a draft from start to finish, spotting infelicitous phrases or unclear sentences and fixing them as you went, you’ve engaged in line editing.
After line editing, copy editing ensures that your work follows your target journal or book publisher’s rules of grammar, spelling, punctuation and formatting. Finally, proofreading catches any unintentional mistakes that make it into the text during design and typesetting. Copy editing and proofreading are often built in to the formal publishing process, meaning that they happen after a manuscript has been accepted for publication and the publisher will either provide these editorial services or explicitly prompt the author when they’re needed.
What many writers don’t realise is that vanishingly few first drafts are immediately ready for line editing, let alone copy editing or proofreading. Nearly every manuscript needs development of its fundamentals – its argument, evidence, structure and overall style – before it’s truly ready to move forward.
When approaching your text developmentally, you’ll be asking questions that can’t be answered by looking at a single line or even a single paragraph. You’ll be evaluating your text with more holistic queries, such as:
- “Is one core argument animating this text and is that argument explicitly stated for the reader early on?”
- “Is all the evidence I’ve chosen to include pointing toward that one core argument, and have I provided careful analysis to connect the evidence to the key points I want readers to take away from it?”
- “Have I broken up the text into sections that guide my reader through my argument step by step, and have I labeled those sections descriptively to create a traversable map of my thinking?”
- “Will my tone throughout this piece win the trust of my intended readership or do I risk alienating them with my level of formality or informality?”
After subjecting your text to these questions, you’ll be able to see whether large-scale revisions, such as inserting new explanations, removing superfluous evidence or drastically reorganising the existing material, are in order.
Because many scholars aren’t aware that developmental editing is a thing, and because they are not taught how to do it for their own drafts in a systematic way well before they even contact a journal or book publisher, too many scholars skip that all-important first stage in the editing process. They may trust that publishers and peer reviewers will let them know if they need to work on any of these fundamental aspects of their manuscript.
But waiting to give your text a developmental edit until you’re already in dialogue with high-stakes readers, such as publishing gatekeepers, poses risks. For one, you risk those readers rejecting the manuscript outright because of major problems before you even get the chance to fix them.
Furthermore, even if preliminary readers such as acquiring editors and peer reviewers are able to see past major issues and allow you to revise and resubmit, waiting to do your developmental editing until after you’ve received formal feedback will prolong the revision process and may introduce additional rounds of review that you could have avoided.
While all levels of editing are important to the success of a scholarly text, developmental editing is arguably the most important piece of the revision puzzle. You may not get the chance to move forward with publication at all if your text’s four pillars aren’t in place and strongly supporting the vital ideas that have emerged from your research. All published texts require editing, and the more you embrace the editing process and build it into your writing process, the more serious and successful a writer you’ll be.
Laura Portwood-Stacer is the author of Make Your Manuscript Work (Princeton University Press, 2025), The Book Proposal Book and the Manuscript Works Newsletter, providing weekly guidance for scholarly writers and publishing professionals.
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