Dear Reader,
I’m currently working with a group of scholars who are learning how to become effective developmental editors of their own writing. This means they’re discovering how to assess their texts for big picture issues like argument and structure and fix the problems that will make the biggest difference in getting their texts accepted for publication.
I gave these writers a warning during our meeting on Monday: Don’t start polishing your prose yet! It’s a trap!
There is a time for polishing your prose to ensure that your ideas and voice come through at the sentence level. But that time occurs later in the revision process than most people think. As I explain in my forthcoming book, Make Your Manuscript Work: A Guide to Developmental Editing for Scholarly Writers, prose polishing (also known as line editing) should always follow developmental editing, after any big-picture cuts, additions, and reorganizations have been completed.
Preserving this order of operations will save you time and effort, because you won’t spend hours tinkering with a paragraph only to find out that a peer reviewer wants you to cut the whole section it appears in or that you actually need to completely overhaul that long chapter you've been polishing as two shorter chapters for the arguments to make sense.
When should you invest time in line editing your manuscript? Just before you’re going to send it to a new set of readers, so they can focus on your ideas without being distracted by the presentation. That means you can give your text a sentence-level polish immediately before you submit it for peer review, or just before you send it to a colleague or professional editor for feedback. Make sure the text is readable, but don’t obsess too much, because the level of polish in your manuscript is unlikely to be the deciding factor in getting the outcome you want in the early stages of the writing and publishing process.
I advise you to save your most intensive polishing work for the very last round of revision, when your manuscript has been accepted or nearly accepted for publication and you are ensuring that your ultimate audience will have a smooth (maybe even pleasurable) reading experience.
When you’re at that point, there are a number of resources you can turn to for guidance. Here are some of the books whose line editing advice I recommend:
(Find my full list of recommended books on scholarly writing and publishing here.)
I suggest skimming several of these titles and choosing just one or two whose style you resonate with, because you could easily fall down a months-long rabbit hole if you try to follow all of them. Give your prose the attention it deserves, but don’t let the line editing stage drag on forever as a way to postpone the truly scary part of the process, which is sending your work off to others and finding out what they think.
Thanks for reading the Manuscript Works Newsletter! Keep scrolling for more resources to help with your scholarly publishing journey.
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This newsletter is coming to you from Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD, professional developmental editor and publishing consultant. I help scholarly writers navigate the book publishing process with more ease and agency.
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