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I always get reflective about my year in reading in late December, and I thought it might be a nice change of pace to take a brief break from the “What Is Editing” series to share some of what I’ve been reading this year.
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When I worked as a writing tutor in a college writing center, we made a distinction between what we called higher-order concerns and lower-order concerns in the student papers we saw. Higher-order concerns were all the fundamental non-sentence-level issues we identified.
They were the big-picture aspects of the paper—everything from weak/incoherent arguments to meandering organization. Sometimes, the paper simply did not fulfil the intended purpose of the assignment. At the writing center, we prioritized evaluating these aspects of the papers.
Invariably, however, students were most focused on lower-order concerns—grammar, spelling, punctuation, formatting, etc.—when they came in to see us. Part of our job was, with the student’s permission, drawing their attention to the higher-order concerns because a paper could be competently written, even well written, from a prose standpoint and still have significant problems. Many students were appreciative of the feedback, even though it wasn’t what they’d ever considered as a potential problem.
As an editor, I’ve found that my author clients tend to seek out feedback on higher-order concerns much more proactively than the students I tutored. However, it can still be a confusing process to navigate. This post talks about two of the most common ways that editors look at higher-order concerns in manuscripts—developmental editing and manuscript critiques.
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If you’ve spent much time on the internet reading about writing a book, chances are you’ve come across references to beta readers. But what is one and do you need one?
A beta reader is, in many ways, a literary guinea pig—and a very useful one, at that.
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“The most important remains—editing, and it’s going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details.” Mikhail Bulgakov
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I’ve loved reading, writing, history, and true crime since I was a child. Some of my earliest memories involve demanding someone, anyone, explain the definitions of words to me; poring over my dad’s history books before I was old enough to understand what they were about; and hiding on the back porch to read true crime stories in magazines.
It is perhaps only inevitable that I grew up to be an editor who specializes in history and true crime, as well as other nonfiction, though it took me awhile to figure that out.
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