“What Is Editing?”–Line Editing and Copyediting

Last time, we talked about higher-order concerns—all those big-picture aspects of a manuscript, such as organization, theme, argumentation—but this time we’re looking at the editing services that address lower-order concerns. Essentially, these are any and all sentence-level issues: style, grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc.

As I mentioned in my last post, when I worked at a college writing center, most of our student clients were far more interested in getting feedback on lower-order concerns than higher-order concerns, so we often had to guide them toward seeing the value in talking about things other than commas. We certainly talked about rogue commas, too, but not at the expense of larger issues in their papers.

I’ve not personally encountered this issue as an editor. Most of the authors I work with are well aware of how valuable it is to receive feedback on both higher-order and lower-order concerns and don’t need to be convinced of the merits of either one. They’re more likely to be unsure of exactly what each service entails and when they need it.

It can be a little overwhelming to wade through, so this post is going to talk about the two most common ways editors address lower-order concerns in manuscripts—line editing and copyediting.

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My 2021 in Books

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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“What is Editing?”–Manuscript Critiques and Developmental Editing

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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More About Me

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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