With twenty years' experience editing nonfiction essays and books, Alice L. McLean will lead your journey from concept to polished manuscript.
Specialized in the humanities and social sciences, Idea into Word can offer aid at any stage in the drafting process and shepherd your manuscript through peer review.
This stage of editing guides the development of your ideas, hones the structure and organization of your manuscript, and pinpoints places where argumentation and evidence might be enhanced. It also makes certain that the key themes of your argument are skillfully woven through the manuscript from beginning to end and that each chapter furthers the project's main thesis. Developmental work also ensures that you have clearly positioned yourself within and against existing scholarship and scholarly debates as well as showcased and illustrated how your research expands, deepens, and shifts your field(s) of study. Finally, this stage can recommend a variety of rhetorical strategies to help you clarify and define your original contribution in a powerful, engaging, and memorable way.
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.