# Name the Editorial Layer

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 90 · Part 9: Revision, editing, and feedback

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> Revision changes meaning and effect; copyediting corrects expression; proofreading verifies production.

In 1860 Lydia Maria Child, editing Harriet Jacobs’s manuscript of *Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl*, wrote to Jacobs that she was “transposing sentences and pages,” and advised cutting the final chapter, on John Brown: “It does not naturally come into your story, and the M. S. is already too long. Nothing can be so appropriate to end with, as the death of your grandmother.” To a friend, Jean Fagan Yellin’s biography *Harriet Jacobs: A Life* reports, Child said she had “abridged, and struck out superfluous words sometimes, but I don’t think I altered fifty words in the whole volume.”

Both accounts are true, because they describe different layers. Almost nothing changed at the level of the word, and a good deal at the level of the book, as her printed introduction said: “At her request, I have revised her manuscript; but such changes as I have made have been mainly for purposes of condensation and orderly arrangement.” Before Yellin’s research in the 1970s and 1980s, the accepted academic opinion, voiced by historians such as John Blassingame, was that the book was fiction, or really Child’s. William L. Andrews writes that the correspondence, published in Yellin’s 1987 edition, shows Child’s role as editor “no more than she acknowledged.” Because Child had stated her layer in the introduction, the claim could be checked against the letters.

A writer who asks for a proofread expects someone to find the structural problem. A manuscript still missing its middle goes to a copy editor, who produces a flawless version of an unfinished draft. At the final stage a proofreader proposes a different ending, and nobody can decide whether to accept it. Or the requested changes arrive as a single list in which an error of fact, a suggestion about character, and a preference about commas have the same tone and the same apparent weight.

No single set of definitions is essential, but the Editorial Freelancers Association’s working definitions are a useful reference for how far each layer reaches into the Work. Developmental editing deals with content, organization, and genre, and may provide an overall critique or a revision letter outlining big-picture issues. Line editing works at the sentence or paragraph level and focuses on the language and style of the text. Copyediting corrects spelling, grammar, usage, and punctuation, checks cross-references, and builds the style sheet that keeps a manuscript consistent. Proofreading, usually among the last stages, checks the publisher’s proof for typographical and formatting errors and confirms that earlier changes were made correctly. The EFA lists research and fact-checking as a separate service, which nonfiction manuscripts can lack altogether.

Each layer assumes the one before it has been settled. A copyedit applied to a chapter that will be cut is wasted work, and a developmental suggestion at proof stage is expensive and disruptive. A line edit before the structure is settled falls under Practice 83, since it polishes what may not survive. The layers also differ in the authority an author normally grants them. A copyeditor’s correction to a date is often accepted without debate, while a developmental editor’s proposal about structure is advice, to be weighed against purpose. Child’s advice to cut the John Brown chapter was advice of that second kind, and Jacobs took it; the printed book has no such chapter.

In practice the layers blur, and some writers must perform several of them alone. Claire Kehrwald Cook’s *Line by Line*, subtitled *How to Edit Your Own Writing*, is addressed to writers who do their own sentence-level editing; no one else may be coming. A line editor may notice a structural problem, and should say so. A short article may compress developmental, line, and copy work into a single pass, and a fact-check can alter a paragraph’s argument. The EFA itself notes that line editing may be combined with developmental editing or with copyediting. The maxim asks for labeling and doesn’t forbid overlap, and once the change is labeled, you can decide what to do about it.

Software sold as an editor may work at one layer or at several without saying which. A suggestion that looks like a copyedit may alter meaning, and a suggested citation may not exist, as Practice 99 recounts. For any automated suggestion, ask which layer it claims to occupy, and read the change before accepting it.

**Practice.** Take any list of requested changes, from an editor, a reader, or a tool. Label each one revision, line, copyedit, proofread, or fact-check, and mark whether it changes meaning. Then sort by layer and deal with the highest first. Anything that arrives at the wrong layer, such as a structural request at proof stage, goes back with a question: decide now, or defer? A list of about a dozen requests takes thirty minutes, and the result is one list in layer order.

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Copyright © Anna Lishman and Brad Lishman. Published by Inkagai, an Algodyne Corporation product.

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