The William, Edit
The William Edit
Developmental Editing
Line Editing
Manuscript Critique
Developmental Editing
Developmental editing plays a vital role in shaping your manuscript to ensure it resonates with readers. This process carefully examines the core elements of your story, making sure they work harmoniously to craft a narrative that is both engaging and compelling. Through attentive evaluation, developmental editing helps your story shine while preserving your unique voice and vision.
Key focus areas include:
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Plot: Ensuring the storyline captivates readers, remains plausible, and flows coherently.
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Characters: Helping characters feel authentic and relatable while maintaining consistency throughout their journeys.
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Structure: Organizing the narrative in a way that emotionally resonates with readers, guiding them through meaningful highs and lows.
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Pacing: Crafting a rhythm that allows pivotal moments to breathe, while keeping the story’s momentum alive.
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Tense and Point of View: Using the most effective tense and perspective for your story, ensuring they are consistently and thoughtfully applied.
Developmental editing emphasizes structural improvements over language refinements. It includes detailed editorial reports highlighting strengths and areas for improvement, with suggested changes and comments directly in the manuscript.
Line Editing
Line editing looks at the style and flow of your writing to ensure your ideas are expressed as accurately and eloquently as possible. It is about clear language, consistent facts, and accurate grammar. This ensures that errors are found and eliminated and align the text with a style guide if applicable.
Key focus areas are:
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Sentence structure – Ensure that sentences flow, are logical, and that structures and rhythms work harmoniously.
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Word Use/Metaphor – Avoiding repetitive words, homonyms, tense mistakes, metaphor, and ensuring the correct words are selected.
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Dialogue – Help make sure dialogue matches the character, is believable (in your book's world), and is proper for the genre and audience.
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Dialogue tags – Ensure tags are appropriately used, avoid overuse, and clean up unusual or strong tags that pull focus.
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Grammar/Punctuation/Spelling - Just as it sounds but with a closer eye.
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Language/Sensitivity - Avoid miss-used phrases and ensures language is proper with respect to the story's time, place, and setting.
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Inconsistency - Corrects any character, story, plot etc. inconsistencies and checks facts both inside and outside of the manuscript.
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Style Guide - If applicable or there is an author provided guide.
Manuscript Critique
Manuscript Critique, sometimes referred to as Beta Reading or Critique Reading, is a read through of the entire manuscript followed by a semi-detailed analysis of the core components of compelling narratives. Choosing a reader who is knowledgeable and well read in the genre and subjects of your writing, is key.
Key focus areas are:
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Opening Impressions
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Genre Convention
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Environment & World
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Character/Conflict
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Plot/Pacing
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Dialogue
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Info/Backstory
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Show vs. Tell
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Overall Impression
