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 reader 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 could be improved. It ensures that your key themes are woven through from beginning to end, that each chapter advances the project’s central goal, and that your main ideas are fully explicated and strategically emphasized for maximum impact. Finally, this stage can recommend rhetorical strategies to help you clarify, define, and articulate those themes in powerful, engaging, and memorable ways. Stage 1 work is delivered as a developmental editing report, with optional margin notes and an optional follow-up report after revision. See Services Offered for more details.
Developmental Editing and Line Editing
Stage 2: Line Editing to Polish Word Choice and Narrative Flow
This stage focuses on the cohesion and coherence of the manuscript's narrative flow. It restructures and refines the expression of your ideas so that each follows logically from the last, enabling 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. Word choice is honed to optimal precision and passages are flagged where examples or more explanation might be incorporated to aid reader comprehension. Extraneous words and phrases will be pruned and rough edges softened. By the end of stage 2, your manuscript will be ready to hand to the press for copy editing. See Services Offered for more details.