With twenty years' experience editing scholarly essays and books, Alice L. McLean, PhD, will lead your journey from ideation through the creation of a 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.
Academic Editing Services
This type 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 to navigate successfully through peer review.
Developmental Editing: Shaping and Refining Content and Structure
Prior to peer review:
After peer review:
This type of editing guides your response to peer review critiques and helps you navigate the revision process. During this stage, Idea into Word will review, organize, and prioritize peer review commentary and deliver a revision plan aimed at helping you successfully sail through to publication.
Copy Editing: Polishing Grammar and Ensuring Consistent Form and Style
Many publishing houses will use in-house copy editors to polish manuscripts prior to publication. This type of editing focuses on correcting grammar and on ensuring that form and style remain consistent throughout a manuscript. Most presses have a bespoke in-house style guide to supplement their primary stylebook—typically Chicago, APA, or MLA. 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 substantive editing, the latter of which does not typically focus on grammar or formatting.
After revisions have been completed:
Substantive Editing: 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. Substantive editing 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.