Thank you to Karen Cole,
Executive Director of Ghost Writing Inc. for writing this guest blog: http://www.rainbowriting.com/ghostwriter.htm
The Many Styles of Editing
By
Karen Cole
Words:
800
Well,
what can I say about copy editing, usually just called editing, as a field? I
have been at the process of becoming an editor for well over the past 30 years,
so I should have something worthwhile to say about it by now, I should think.
But I won’t cover APA style or the use of the Chicago Manual or other such
style manuals – I’ll just do a basic overview of the most common editing forms
here.
Foundationally,
editing is a much discredited but mostly honorable profession for writers and
would-be writers who have a degree in English and enough experience generating
copy to know what to look for in the spelling, grammar and syntax departments.
That kind of editing is primarily called line editing, and it doesn’t entail
much more than heavily proofreading and correcting copy so that it reads well,
taking out redundancies and otherwise improving the “flow” while maintaining
the original author’s “voice” throughout (vital to most ghost writing, which I
will discuss later.)
Line
editing is just one step down from color editing, which includes everything in
line editing and then some – you want to now edit for how the content reads as
a whole, but not in a generalized way as you would with content or
developmental editing. You just need to “pep up” or otherwise alter the flavor,
spicing (I use recipe references a lot), sophistication and overall tone of the
piece you are color editing. The idea with this kind of editing is to enhance
the reader’s enjoyment of the experience, as well as to make the copy read in a
more professional or sophisticated (sometimes, depending on the desired
“voice,” in a less sophisticated or more typically familiar) tone.
The
next step up in editing is a big one, and is in fact more rewriting than
editing – content editing. This also includes developmental editing, although
some think of them as two separate editing styles. Me, I tend to blend all of
my editing styles with writing and ghost writing styles, although I try hard to
maintain the original author’s voice every time. Anyway, content editing means
reworking or sometimes only adding some content to the piece, while making sure
it “fits in” to the original or desired writing style.
Reworking
may mean a thorough rewrite of everything, or it may only mean some
rearrangement, such as shuffling chapters around in order to improve things.
The idea behind both content and developmental editing is to enhance and
improve the piece, so that its overall structure is more sound, making it read
from beginning to end in a better and improved manner. But content editing may
not be quite as thorough as its “big brother,” developmental editing, which is
the most thorough style of editing. Content editing is to developmental editing
what re-frosting an already baked cake is to actually making a new cake with
similar batter and completely baking it all over again.
When
you developmentally edit, you work over a manuscript, rewriting nearly
everything or at least what the client or publisher has requested as needed. If
it’s your own manuscript, you are in effect rewriting your whole book to suit
you or a publisher’s desires. You add some fresh material, but in greater
amounts than in content editing, sometimes putting in new characters, whole
chapters, new plot devices and scenes, reformatting the manuscript or
screenplay, etc.
When
you developmentally edit a screenplay or script (which is probably the most
common work done on other people’s scripts), you are taking the whole thing in
hand and doing it all over again, maybe in a whole new voice or angle of view.
The same thing applies to any book manuscript or short story that requires
serious developmental editing – working it over in a whole new image – while
the ideas of the client still need to be paramount as you go about the editing
process.
All in
all, these many different styles of editing can be rearranged or blended into
writing and rewriting as needed. Just remember that editing always entails more
than mere proofreading – which involves checking for grammatical and syntactic
errors and correcting them. Line editing is the first step above proofreading;
all editing inherently includes basic proofreading, although the latter can be
performed separately by someone else, such as when professional proofreading is
requested and a “second set of eyes” is needed to check over the final piece
before publication.
The most
important thing to remember when copy editing other people’s work is to keep to
their voices as much as possible, or at least as much as desired by the client.
Editing is a practical process that almost anyone can do, if they know
spelling, grammar and syntax rules, but it takes a real professional to
proficiently rework and manage an entire manuscript or screenplay expertly and
with a touch of true style.
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