Editing, Proof reading & Layout
Editing
The Editor looks the big picture stuff, the whole structure and flow.
Its their job to identify assumed knowledge (common where writers are so intimately familiar with a subject they forget that some readers will be missing the basics), as well as over-writing.
An overblown story is like an over-furnished room – it’s becomes hard to appreciate the beauty of the period Chippendale chair when its pressed between a 1970s cabinet TV and a 1980s industrial pipe wine rack.
It’ll often go back to the writer with recommendations to swap chapters, add new chapters – and possibly cut some.
Proof Reading
After edit, when the writer is happy with the story and structure this is the eagle-eyed look for mistakes – there are always mistakes.
We read what we intended to write, so much so it’s very difficult to see what we actually wrote.
Mostly our brains are great at glossing over transposed letters, missing vowels, even missing joining words. Right up until the moment they’re not.
Layout
We read with our eyes – historically book publishing has been a lazy business of word overruns, widows and orphans, all visual distractions that disturb the flow of the reader.
At Write Answers we include a subediting phase where we layout each page, chapter and sentence so it has the correct visual flow as well as the right words.
Sound exhausting? It is – but we think it’s worth it in the finished product.
“O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us
An’ ev’n devotion!”
– Robbie Burns (To a Louse)
“It takes less time to do a thing right than to
explain why you did it wrong.”– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow