With twenty years' experience editing essays and books, Alice L. McLean will lead your journey from concept to polished manuscript.
Idea into Word can offer aid at any stage in the drafting process. Whether you need help organizing ideas, fleshing out and supporting your core arguments, crafting an engaging narrative, or responding to feedback, Idea into Word can step in to provide assistance, support, and editorial guidance.
This stage of editing guides the development of your ideas, hones the structure and organization of your manuscript, and pinpoints places where pacing might be enhanced. It also makes certain that the key themes of your manuscript are skillfully woven through from beginning to end and that each chapter furthers the project's main goal. Finally, this stage can recommend a variety of rhetorical strategies to help you clarify, define, and articulate your main themes in powerful, engaging, and memorable ways.
Developmental Editing
Copy Editing: Polishing Grammar and Ensuring Consistent Form and Style
After a manuscript has undergone all necessary major revisions, it enters into the copy editing stage. This type of editing focuses on correcting grammar and on ensuring that form and style remain consistent throughout a manuscript. Depending on the press and the needs of the author, copy editors may approach a manuscript with a light, a medium, or a heavy hand. Heavy copy editing may overlap with the second stage of developmental editing to polish rough edges. Most presses have a bespoke in-house style guide to supplement their primary stylebook—typically Chicago, APA, or MLA—and many will use in-house copy editors to work on manuscripts prior to publication.
Stage 2: Honing Word Choice and Narrative Flow
This type of editing focuses on the cohesion and coherence of the manuscript's narrative flow. It restructures and refines ideas so that they follow a logical progression that enables a reader to ease into the text and trust you as their guide through complex and nuanced terrain. This second stage ensures that paragraph-to-paragraph and sentence-to-sentence transitions are seamless. It also illuminates and refines the manuscript's key ideas and themes so that they flow and gradually develop from beginning to end. At this stage, word choice is honed to optimal precision and passages are flagged where examples or more explanation might be incorporated to aid reader comprehension. Extraneous material will be pruned and rough edges softened.