As editors, we are going into a piece to fine-tune, polish, and provide suggestions to help make the author’s writing as clear and understandable as they can be. Our aim is to help readers best understand the wonderful worlds and stories authors create. It is also our job to protect authorial voices and ensure their work remains their work. In the end, editing is making suggestions. We may utilize tools like The Chicago Manual of Style, which put forth rules for how to craft prose, but it is an author’s choice to accept or reject those suggestions. Editing is not a power; it’s a responsibility to uphold best practices for the benefit of our authors. These are some of the tips to keep in mind when stepping into a project.

Know what level of editing you are completing. This will impact how much editing you should be doing and the degree to which you make suggestions. The Chicago Manual of Style breaks up copyediting into two categories: mechanical editing and substantive editing (CMOS, 2.48). Mechanical editing is as it sounds, you’re looking at the mechanics of written language and making sure they follow our grammar rules. Are the commas being used correctly? Should these words be hyphenated or joined as a single word? Substantive editing is more in-depth and more invasive. This is the editing where you go in and look at word choice, sentence flow, readability, and comprehension. The more substantive editing happens in a heavier copyedit. Because this level of editing is more invasive on the writing itself, it is important to be sure that this is what is expected of you. If an author thinks you are going in to edit their piece only for egregious grammar errors and to ensure consistency within their work (a lighter copyedit) and they receive back a heavily marked manuscript full of suggestions for rewording, they may be taken aback. Knowing the level of edit expected of you will ensure you’re not blindsiding an author, and it will also save you time as perhaps they only wanted a light edit which should require less time-intensive work for you.

Query and suggest wherever you can rather than enact changes. As a rule of thumb an editor should be working with some form of track-changes feature when editing a manuscript. This allows for clarity and transparency about what is being altered or changed. That being said, just because the author can see what you changed does not mean they will understand why you changed something. If you are doing more substantive edits then it is best practice to offer multiple suggestions for a proposed change. Say you are proposing they reword a sentence for increased readability. Rather than just make the change, give the author some options (good synonyms) for how they could reword the sentence and why. You don’t need to go into a paragraph length explanation—margins aren’t that big—but a quick blurb about how it helped your readability may help the author understand as well. They know their book forward and backward. The benefit to being an outside set of eyes as an editor is you will catch the moments that may be clear to the author (because they know everything about the book already) but not to a first-time reader. Polite queries and asking for clarification can help make the process feel more like a conversation about the piece rather than a lecture from an editor. They may help spark an idea neither of you had initially that works much better.

I do think it is incredibly important to highlight that editors also have a responsibility to learn the material they are editing. Inundating an author with queries and questions that you could have researched and answered on your own is not helpful. If you are working on a subject matter that you are less familiar with, do some research and inform yourself. Being conscious editors is key.

Respect their work and their authority over it. No one should be more knowledgeable about a book and its content than the author. An author is the expert when it comes to their book and should be treated as such. There are many factors to consider when editing a book, or working on any stage of book publication for that matter. Who is the audience of the book? What does this audience know about the genre and the topic? What do they expect from the genre? You may not be the target audience for a book; you may not have the background knowledge for a genre. In these cases, it is important to remember that it’s not about what you want to read but what the target audience wants to read and will understand. Author’s are human and fallible as well, so it is our responsibility to help guide them, but never to (literally) overwrite them.

Editing is, in my opinion, a vital part of the process. I struggle to turn off that editorial mind when I read just about anything. I am grateful I get to use this to help authors with their amazing stories. It all comes down to readability and ensuring the author’s message is being told in the best way possible—to ensure the reader’s understanding—while remaining true to the author’s voice.

Written by Marissa Muraoka.