Developmental editing is a phase of the book editing process where editors give a thorough evaluation of an author’s work to help determine what it needs in order to be ready for publishing.
What are examples of developmental editing?
Some components developmental editors address include:
- Character development.
- Dialogue.
- Tone or style.
- Sentence phrasing.
- Pacing.
- Setting.
- Potential plot holes.
Below I will walk you through an example of some developmental editing I’ve done. This is an excerpt from a larger work. It needs work and is rough in many places but nothing that cannot be fixed.
So I went to work on doing a developmental edit, which is what the document needed. I included editing of words and added what I hoped would be helpful suggestions in order to aid the author to better refine their vision.
Every green text is a suggestion. Every yellow highlight is at least one comment about the line. I tend to use Google Documents for ease of access when editing. This is just an example of one step of the author’s and editor’s process. The sidebar of notes goes on far longer than the document itself.
Steven Mattor 