Editorship
What is Editing?
During the writing process, the most crucial aspect for authors is to transfer their characters and plot developments from their minds onto the page. Therefore, they might not give sufficient attention to many aspects such as narrative language, spelling rules, punctuation marks, and syntax, or they might overlook these aspects entirely.
Your text, in its finished form, is akin to a diamond just extracted from the depths of the earth. For it to dazzle with its beauty, it needs to undergo various processes, including cutting and polishing. This metaphor aligns perfectly with the editorial processes, such as removing unnecessary parts and strengthening the important sections of a text.
Editors are professionals who handle a completed text, from the smallest details like punctuation marks to the largest elements like consistency, preparing it for publication. Therefore, an editor must be knowledgeable in technical areas like grammar, as well as possess an artistic flair to handle the world you have created with your pen in its entirety. At the end of these processes, thanks to the editor who has also considered the target audience during the text's review, your work is ready to reach its readers, reflecting the author's mind in the best way possible.
What Processes Does Editing Cover?
Editing and developmental editing processes encompass a broader perspective of your text. During writing, you might have lost focus at certain points, concentrated on the wrong aspects in some sections, or changed your writing tone at a juncture. Editorial processes not only highlight inconsistencies, content, and timeline errors in your work, as well as parts that need improvement or removal but also offer suggestions to bring them to their best form. It examines and addresses your work from the perspective of the publisher and your target audience. This ensures that a character doesn't have blond hair on one page and brown hair on another, doesn't get into a white car and get out of a yellow one, or doesn't have a Friday following a Wednesday. Some authors only realize they haven't introduced main characters throughout their stories, haven't provided necessary descriptions of key locations, or haven't noticed missing or excess sections in their books until their texts go through an editor's expert assessment.
In the first printed edition of the Harry Potter book, the list of school supplies included a magic wand twice. This editorial error made this first edition a highly valuable collector's item today. However, if you're not as famous worldwide as Harry Potter, the lack of editorial processes will only alienate readers from you. A good editor ensures the proper flow of sections and paragraphs, oversees the length of sections and the overall flow of the text, ensures that dialogues are realistic, and makes sure that the readers will react to the characters as the author intended. Unlike a writer's coach, an editor begins these processes after your work is completed and handles works that have not yet been sent to publishers or have been rejected by them. This provides you with the opportunity to bring your work to its best form.
Proofreading, different from editing, is the process of reviewing a work for grammar and spelling rules. People who do proofreading are called proofreaders. An experienced proofreader not only highlights your work in the eyes of the publishers you apply to but also helps readers better grasp what you have written. To give a simple example, even the incorrect use of punctuation marks in your texts can ruin the experience your work offers to the reader.
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