Developmental Editing

What is Developmental Editing?

A developmental editor helps you develop your idea or manuscript at any stage. We help you strengthen your arguments, structure, and prose. We discuss your framework, aim, questions of historiography & methodology, and how your manuscript reads. In short, we are an interlocutor, reader, and editor all at once throughout the entire process of developing, drafting, and publishing your manuscript. We tailor our services to your particular needs. Here are some of the things that we do:

At the beginning of a project

• Brainstorm the direction and shape of your project.
• Develop a research plan (including identifying relevant primary sources  and developing secondary source bibliographies).
• Develop a research workflow  how to best organize, save, and catalog archival sources; how to develop a writing process).

In the middle of a project

• Develop the outline and framework of your manuscript,
• Find strategies to manage authorial anxieties or beat “writer’s block.”
• Support the writing and completion of a project: dissertation, article, book.
• Clarify arguments, strengthen your prose, and organize the flow of ideas into a compelling whole, with particular attention to your audience.
• Develop a plan for revisions (with a report or direct interventions in the manuscript) before manuscript submission or after peer review reports, or suggestions from mentors or colleagues.
• Develop your book proposal, synopsis, or “pitch.”
• Identify presses, journals, or other publication outlets that best fit your project and publication goals.

After your manuscript has been accepted for publication

•  Edit the final versions of your manuscript: line editing, editorial suggestions, fixing citations, etc.
• Help with the permissions process for images, texts under copyright, etc. or finding appropriate images that fit your budget, people to help you develop maps, charts and graphs, or other additional elements for your manuscript.