Hands on or hands off? The different approaches to professional writing
Whereas some content creators are happy with playing a more executive-level role in their authorship by reviewing, approving and putting their name to a text drafted by a professional writer, others prefer to hone this craft and do the writing themselves. There are multiple, different well-defined options available to cater to each creators different needs and preferences based on their unique aptitudes, skills, and schedules.
Let’s take a look at these options, which are ghostwriting, developmental editing, stylistic editing, copy editing, and proofreading. Having a clear idea of what they offer will help you to understand which is right for you and therefore to get the most value from your collaboration with editorial professionals.
Creative developmental editing
What does creative development editing involve
Developmental editing is the most comprehensive and thorough form of editing. It’s primarily about the substance of what you say.
The tasks performed during developmental editing:
- Making sure the text presents information in a coherent order. Has a friend or relative ever pushed your patience and concentration close to the breaking point by making you sit through a long, convoluted personal anecdote? You want to scream, “Get to the point!”. Well, what you’re experiencing in this situation is a story that has no organization or structure. As the storyteller meanders from one tangent to another or pings back and forth in time, the narrative becomes a maze with no clear path or endpoint in sight.
These issues are just as much a problem in writing. The longer or more complicated a document, the more important—but also more difficult to manage—structure and organization become if the reader is able to follow along easily. When editors perform developmental editing, they assess whether sentences, paragraphs and sections (and even chapters, in the case of a book) follow a logical order that best supports the author’s central argument or main idea. They will suggest reordering, deleting or adding in passages to remedy the problems they find, though often they’ll need to seek clarifications and further information from the author so they can do this.
- Spotting what’s missing from the text. Another reason why friends’/relatives’ convoluted personal anecdotes can be so difficult to follow is that they leave out pieces of information that the audience needs to understand the story. Neglecting to share critical details in this way is something almost all of us do. This often happens when you insert or change the point you are talking about and smush it together with another point without completing it.
All too often, we unconsciously assume that other people know what we know. We’re more likely to do this when we’re talking about our subject matter expertise or the things that we know a lot about. This is why people with PhDs or deep domain experts have a hard time telling people about their work at dinner parties. They know so much, and much of it is interesting but they can’t see the forest for the trees. Their expertise gets in the way because they cannot summarize and create approachable talkable points or elevator pitches for the entry level. So when people write texts on topics they know a lot about—this, by the way, is one of the main reasons why people publish—they need to think especially carefully about what information their audience needs to be given.
Developmental editing can stop key details from getting lost in mental blind spots, pointing out which passages of your text need more information, elaboration, examples, or evidence.
Making Your Ideas Stronger and Scrutinizing the text’s arguments
There are two main environments in which our arguments and ideas live: in our minds and out in the real world. The real world is a much more hostile environment for them. Why? Because in our own minds, they always seem to make sense, but out in the real world, their flaws are mercilessly exposed.
Just think about all the times you’ve read a comment left below on an article or on social media and immediately seen gaping holes in its logic—or haven’t even been able to find a discernible point at all. Well, in the mind of the person who left the comment, what they had to say made perfect sense. What they needed before they hit publish was for someone to examine their arguments and point out the flaws in them.
Even the most articulate people in the world have groups of people around them who are dedicated to helping with communications. Working with people you dedicate to helping you say what you want to say is critical for making your ideas, and thus, your communications stronger and more compelling.
And that’s exactly what developmental editors do. They will check whether the points you want to make are clearly stated, coherently developed and persuasively made throughout the text.
Creative development editing focuses on these two main areas:
- Getting your facts right. Nothing undermines the credibility of an author like a misstated fact does—even if the mistake has no bearing on the main point the author wants to make.
While it’s unlikely that you’re going to get facts related strictly to your area of expertise wrong, the texts you write will probably also include information from outside of it. You may be on less steady ground here. For example, that arresting quote by Albert Einstein or Mahatma Gandhi that you’ve used to grab readers’ attention: Did he actually say it?At the top of developmental editors’ list of priorities is making sure your facts check out, whether you’re quoting to inspire, using statistics to prove a point, or profiling the places where the issues you’re discussing are most important. Like any type of literary device, you don’t want to stop your audience from following along because of an unforced error or mistake that could have been easily caught.
- Finding the best angle. One of the greatest challenges for writers is tackling the subject they want to talk about in a way that ticks two boxes for their target readership. First, the text needs to be pitched at the right level for its readers, because they will probably stop reading if it’s either too technically complicated or too dumbed down for them. Second, it needs to present the topic from an angle the people it’s aimed at find compelling.
People who publish their expertise can find it difficult to get these two areas right. Interested and well versed in every detail of their domain, they tend to overpack their writing with details and don’t appreciate that their chosen topic may only be interesting to readers if they can see its relevance to something that matters to them personally.
Crafting content with a unique hook that not only captures but sustains interest is a formidable task, but it’s one developmental editors can help with. If you’re pitching your discussion over your readers’ heads or burying the interesting part of what you have to say, they’ll tell you and suggest ways to put things right.
Who is creative development editing for
People who have lots of ideas and want to get them down on paper but don’t have experience in organizing a text or making sure their sentences build up to a coherent point; stream-of-consciousness writers; people who want to learn writing skills from a professional writer at the same time as they produce thought leadership and content for their personal branding. People who are early in creating content and need to formulate their talking points. For people with embryonic ideas, a good story and good points are the most foundational thing to start getting right immediately.
At C&C, we believe for content novices, social media is on the best ways to develop content and practice publishing it.
Stylistic editing
What does stylistic editing involve?
If developmental editing is about what you say, stylistic editing is about how you say it. On several levels, paying attention to this aspect of the writing process is a true difference maker. It’s what turns a dull account that most people will gloss over into an article that everyone’s sharing, or an argument that few people buy into one that more people are on board with.
Stylistic editing focuses on these two main areas
- Making prose that’s clear and flows. Reading is a bit like driving: anything that slows us down or makes the journey less smooth is annoying. Awkwardly worded sentences are the potholes you can’t avoid, ambiguous phrasing those highway-turnoff signs that make you doubt you’re in the right lane, and so on.A stylistic editor examines sentences and paragraphs to ensure that ideas are expressed as clearly and directly as possible. This might involve rephrasing awkward or convoluted sentences or breaking up overly long paragraphs. An editor will also make sure different paragraphs and sections are connected by sentences that create a smooth transition rather than an abrupt change of direction. And they’ll flag and suggest revisions for any statements or phrases that might be ambiguous to readers.
- Making the tone and voice on point and engaging. Some texts speak with authority and gravitas. Some create a cozy familiarity between reader and writer by striking an informal, conversational tone. Some are aimed at readers who appreciate being spoken to in the jargon and terminology of their professional field or delight in elaborate sentences. Other texts are aimed at people who value plain language that gets straight to the point.
Any given idea can be expressed in dozens of different voices. The best one to use is the one in which your readers like to be addressed. Not all writers know which voice that is, and even if they do, they may not be experienced in writing in it. Correcting a text’s voice so it’s right for its audience and the author’s objectives happens at the stylistic editing stage. Stylistic editors know how to tweak things like grammar, vocabulary and sentence length to amplify or tone down formality, assertiveness, playfulness, gravity, flamboyance and all the other qualities that define a text’s voice. What they do is the linguistic equivalent of the work a sound engineer does at a mixing console.
Who is stylistic editing for?
People who know exactly what they want to say and can construct coherent arguments but are limited in terms of the voice they use when they do so. For example, many of us rely on the writing styles we developed from writing college papers. That style communicates information, but it doesn’t necessarily appeal to readers, because it’s very dry and wordy.
Talk about it from a stage standpoint. You have the talking points (Development Stage). Now you have to decide who you are reaching and then write to how they want to be reached. We could also plug a quick link to here is how to understand your customer?
Copyediting
Outside of the editorial/publishing world, the term “copyediting” has become a catch-all that people use when they mean “make this text better” but don’t want to specify exactly in what ways the text should be improved. A lot of the time, when clients ask a freelancer or an editing service for “copy editing,” they’re in fact looking for the text to be improved in ways that fall within the remit of developmental editing or stylistic editing.
What does copy editing actually involve?
It’s essentially about ensuring that the rules of grammar books, style guides and dictionaries are consistently and correctly applied within the text, to the extent that the author or the publisher wants these rules to be applied. That work primarily involves focusing on the following areas:
- Grammar: Copy editors weed out grammatical errors such as subject-verb disagreement, dangling participle phrases and incorrect tense usage.
- Punctuation: Copy editors ensure correct and consistent use of punctuation marks.
- Spellings: Apart from obvious spelling errors, this also involves ensuring that particular spelling conventions are used consistently (for example, using -ize instead of -ise depending on whether you are speaking to an American or British English audience). In a similar vein, copy editors also make sure that multiple variants of things like people’s names and titles of organizations are not used.
- Formatting: The copy editor makes sure that a consistent approach to issues such as capitalization of headings, use of bold and italics, and treatment of numbers (i.e., when a number is spelled in words and when a numeral is used) is applied.
If a professional developmental editor and/or stylistic editor has already worked on the text, the text should not contain many grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors. In this scenario, the copy editor is a backstop whose involvement in the editing process frees the developmental editor and stylistic editor from fussy work that is best left to a later stage.
The level of work required at the copy editing stage will likely be higher if the text goes directly from the author to the copy editor. And often in this situation the copy editor will begin spotting (and potentially correcting) issues that would usually get dealt with at the developmental or stylistic editing stages.
Given that some editors are willing to try to address these areas within what they and the client call a “copy edit,” you might by wondering why someone would bother with the other types of editing at all. The answer is simple: it’s basically far too mentally taxing for one person to do all the duties of developmental, stylistic and copy editing all at once—or to do them all well, at least.
Who is copyediting for
Most people who want to publish high quality content, including those who are experienced and skilled writers, because authors tend to be blind to the small mistakes they’ve made. Everyone needs a second pair of eyes; those eyes should be connected to a brain that is a master grammarian and is trained in spotting mistakes.
Proofreading – Where does it fit in?
‘Proofreading’ is a term that creates confusion as ‘copyediting’ does. To many people, these two terms are interchangeable. Many others understand proofreading to be the final round of copy editing, where any remaining small mistakes are caught. Strictly speaking, though, proofreading is about working with the text once it has been placed into the layout of the publication. It’s only something authors need to handle if they are self-publishing a book in print.
Reach out if you are in need of dedicated writing and editorial support. We can help you build a great writing practice to achieve your goals.
.png)
