Don’t ask your developmental editor to “go easy”

It sounds simple. You give your editor a copy of your manuscript; they return the copy with specific edits, questions, and several pages of general comments. The editor’s job is to make suggestions that improve a nonfiction book in every possible way — including clarity of ideas, structure, tone, paragraphs, sentences, and words.

As your editor, I welcome your suggestions. I want to know what you’re worried about — the length, structure, inconsistencies, and weak spots in the manuscript. I’ll pay close attention to those. Basically, you can ask me to do more.

But you cannot ask me to do less. I won’t “go easy on you.”

What I won’t do

If you feel protective of your manuscript, don’t give it to a good developmental editor. The editor will be tough on your manuscript because that’s their job. If editing was a massage, I’m going to do the deep-tissue work. You can’t hire me just to do a “club rub.”

Here are some instructions that I, as a developmental editor, will not accept:

• Just give it a quick read and find the big problems. I am incapable of following that instruction. My only way to edit is to find all the problems at all the different levels at once.
• The length is fine. If your book is 90,000 words long, it needs to be trimmed. If it is includes redundant text, I’ll suggest where to take it out. If you repeat yourself or go too far with adjectives and adverbs, I’ll cut them. A manuscript I edit nearly always ends up shorter, leaner, and more powerful. Don’t tell me the length is fine.
• Ignore structural problems. A book is an edifice. It follows a logical sequence. If you present ideas out of sequence, the reader will not be able to follow your argument. Some of the best value you get from me will be suggestions to change the arrangement of chapters, and of arguments within chapters. The penalty for ignoring that advice is to present yourself as a muddled thinker — which is bad for both you and your reader.
• Truth isn’t an issue. I believe that the first duty of a nonfiction author is to tell the truth. You don’t get to invent statistics or use facts of questionable veracity. You don’t get to misquote people. I may not catch all the factual errors in your manuscript, but I will catch a lot of them, and I will insist that you fix them. I am unwilling to edit a manuscript and preserve the lies in it.
• Consistency doesn’t matter. Inconsistency bothers readers. If you call the same thing by three different names in different chapters, I’ll point that out. If some chapter titles are two-word phrases and some are twelve-word sentences, I’ll make note of that. If you start half the chapters with a subtitle and leave it out of the other half, you’ll hear about it. If half your notes are footnotes and half are endnotes, I’ll notice and point that out. You want your reader thinking about the ideas in your book, not the inconsistencies — so I’ll tell you how to remove them.
• I don’t want to be bound by the rules of grammar. Sorry, my friend. Grammar has rules. Run-on sentences are bad. Subjects and verbs that don’t agree are incorrect. Solution is not a verb. There is such a thing as artistic license, and I certainly understand that you don’t want to feel rigidly constrained by rules. But don’t ask me to accept and ignore the fact that you’ve left the rules of grammar and spelling behind.
• Don’t worry about sources. Real authors give credit. If they repeat ideas taken from other people, they give those people credit. Authors may have forgotten where they heard something and imagine that it is original with them. But I’m likely to notice, and will suggest where credit is due. (I actually once worked with authors who not only stole liberally, but stole ideas I’d worked on. You can bet I insisted on appropriate credit.) Citing other authors makes you sound like more of an authority; stealing their ideas makes you a pariah.
• Ignore the formatting. Your manuscript will eventually go into a book production process. The people doing layout will need to know about paragraphs, bullets, figures, headings, footnotes, and all the other elements that make up a manuscript. That process will go well if you format your book clearly and consistently, for example, taking care to distinguish different head levels and using italics for emphasis rather than ALL CAPS or bold. I’ll show you how to clean that up. I am not capable of ignoring formatting problems, because I want to make things clear and easy for the people in the process of book production.
• Just accept AI-generated text. I can’t do that. I will run your manuscript through Pangram. I will identify where the text is AI-generated. I will point out where your writing is AI-generated (or seems to be) and suggest ways to fix it. No, that doesn’t mean I’m going to complain about every em-dash, but I’ll certainly make note of the places where you keep saying “It’s not this, it’s that.” You need me to do this. You don’t want uncopyrightable AI-generated text in your manuscript. And you don’t want text that sounds so much like AI that your reader resents it.

You still have the power of the stet

It’s still your book. You can ignore anything I say. My job is to point out problems and suggest fixes; your job is to decide what to do about what I’ve suggested. “Stet” means let it stand. Use it.

But you can’t get me to work more cheaply by ignoring certain kinds of problems; that’s not what I do.

And you can’t get me not to point out those problems because it’s going to hurt your feelings.

You can do whatever you want after you receive my edits. You can pretend you didn’t see the problems I raised.

But deep inside, you’ll know it’s wrong.