The Editing Process

Editing is the method of revising a piece of writing’s material, organization, grammar, and presentation. The aim of editing is to make sure that your ideas are conveyed as clear as possible to your reader.

If you are a writer, you are well aware of the fact that editing is a vital part of writing. It involves a lot of work and requires a lot of time. This is where Turtle Publishing comes in. We, along with our hand selected professionals give your book the polish that it deserves. The editorial services offered by Turtle Publishing include manuscript assessment, structural editing, copy editing and final proofreading before the production and publishing takes place.

From beginning to end, we’ll work on all forms of book editing for your project. Throughout the method, we will communicate with you and will navigate with your feedback.

There are four types of editing involved in making a book interesting and easier to read. These are:

• Developmental Editing
• Copy Editing
• Line Editing
• Proofreading

Developmental Editing

A comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the entire manuscript is what developmental editing entails. It focuses at anything and everything about your writing, from individual words and sentences to the overall structure and style. This edit will also fix any plot and characterization problems in fiction.

Early in the publishing process, when the author is still drafting, a developmental edit will be done. Before the manuscript is ready for a developmental edit, the author would have revised it many times. A professional editor isn’t needed for every book’s developmental editing. Feedback from insightful beta readers might be sufficient to smooth out all of the book’s tangles. A developmental edit, however, would certainly assist in the improvement of your manuscript.

Copy Editing

The manuscript is ready for copy editing when the author is completely satisfied with the plot, story structure, characterization, settings, and so on.

Copy editing is the method of checking text for spelling, grammar, jargon, punctuation, vocabulary, semantics, and formatting errors. Copy editing also ensures that the writer’s intended message is simple and understandable. They ensure that all factual information in the document is correct, and that any possible legal problems are raised with the publisher.

Our editors work on a Word file copy of the author’s manuscript, using the track changes function and adding comments to explain any changes or make revision suggestions. After that, the author will go through each of the changes and approve or deny them one by one, as well as make any necessary changes.

Line Editing

Line editing entails editing a book sentence by sentence (or line by line) in order to improve the prose while keeping craft in mind. A line edit ensures that the content of your book is consistent, while the language is creative and concise. Line editing essentially improves the clarity and style of your manuscript, which is why it’s also known as “stylistic editing.”

Line editors increase their efforts to suggest changes to make sentences crisper and tighter by addressing redundancy and verbosity issues, as well as improving awkward sentence and paragraph construction without requiring a complete rewrite. Our editors will examine the manuscript holistically, reviewing key aspects such as the narrative, vocabulary, structure, characterization, and style.

Proof reading

After developmental and copy/line editing, the manuscript is ready for formatting. Your manuscript is formatted for print and will be delivered to you exactly as the reader will see it. This is then followed by a proofread.

Proofreading entails carefully examining your text to detect and correct typographical errors as well as errors in grammar, style, and spelling. Proofreading is essential for any text that will be shared with an audience, whether it is an academic paper, a job application, an online article, or a print flyer. Depending on your skills and budget, you can proofread the text yourself or hire a professional.

At this point, we will have converted the manuscript text into the final format of the book. That means it’s too late to make major structural changes or delete paragraphs and sentences, as doing so will have repercussions on subsequent pages. It can take a long time and a lot of money to redesign the book after such significant changes. As a result, proofreading is intended to catch final typos and spelling errors as well as to correct inconsistencies, such as ensuring that the word “proofreading” is always spelled as a single word rather than “proof-reading” or “proof reading.”

In the case of printed books, our proofreaders also look for awkward word splits at the end of a line and make sure there isn’t an ugly single line left at the top of the page from the previous paragraph (known in publishing as a widow) or at the bottom of the page that belongs with the paragraph on the next page (orphan).

By hiring Turtle Publishing for your editing process, you will not be disappointed and we will deliver you with the best possible work. The professional editors at turtle publishing make sure that all of your requirements are met and your book comes off as interesting and easy to read.

Kathy Shanks

Turtle Publishing was founded in 2020 by self-employed designer and happily married mother of two, Kathy Shanks. With 20 years of design experience and having created her own journal in 2019, where she subsequently believes that the ‘universe started throwing books at her’, Kathy is passionate about creating designs that convey the right emotion and ‘vibe’ to the right audience and specialises in budget friendly publishing solutions.