Beginners and experts have been asking this question forever – just what is the difference between editing and proofreading? Aren’t they the same? And what is copyediting?

Let’s not forget substantive editing, developmental editing, stylistic editing – have you got a headache yet?  We’re only just getting started – line editing, structural editing, technical editing, fact-checking; the list goes on. Some people even say that proofreading is editing.

In all honesty, it isn’t as complicated as it seems to be and all writers should really have a decent understanding of editing and proofreading; these are things that you can do yourself and most writers already do.

Writing Stages

Out of all the concepts, editing is likely the most confusing while proofreading and copyediting are specific. All writing should, in an ideal world, go through four separate stages:

Writing

Editing

Copyediting

Proofreading

You already know the writing part so we can leave that and move to editing.

This is where things get confusing because the editing process overlaps with writing early in the process and, later, there are blurry lines between copyediting and proofreading.

Not only that, many professionals use these terms differently from one another. For example, editorial services, publishing houses, and freelancers will all have different definitions of the process although they do work inside certain boundaries.

For example, many use the terms of developmental editing and substantive editing to mean the same thing. While stylistic editing may be done as its own process, usually it is part of another process. And copyediting tends to be used interchangeably with line editing – sometimes.

We can say that editing is about making improvements on reasonably good work before we look at the smaller details. This stage is substantive or developmental editing.

The Bigger Picture – Substantive or Developmental

Let’s say you have penned a novel. The first step in editing is developmental or substantive editing. The editors will look at the whole manuscript broadly and will make suggestions about organization, consistency, and structure. They may highlight issues with point of view, conflict, tension or characterization. They may determine that there is too much dialog or not enough detail.

They don’t look at sentence structure, grammar, spelling, or punctuation at this stage; instead, they try to improve the bigger picture, the story if you like, from start to finish. This has to be right before the smaller details are looked at.

Developmental editing can blur into substantive which is focused on the finer structural points; organization of paragraphs and chapters, transition, sentences, etc. Again, this comes down the company you use and their definition of editing.

To confuse things even further, substantive editing may also be seen as heavy copyediting and could lead to sentence-level and paragraph-level rewrites.

If you edit your own work, developmental editing will involve determining if something needs to be added or removed, information organization and focus refinement. When you think everything is in shape, the next step is copyediting, which I will discuss in more detail in part 2 of the miniseries.