Do I Need Developmental Editing for My Academic Book Manuscript?

When writing a journal article or book, scholars are often very (too?) close to their writing. In cultural anthropology, this is compounded by the fieldwork experience. You probably heard the advice about leaving your field notes alone for a few weeks after completing fieldwork, and taking a break or even a holiday if possible.

The same applies when you’ve been working intensively on an article or book chapter. Leaving a text in a metaphorical drawer for a few weeks is sometimes enough, especially if you can also source some informal peer review from reliable academic colleagues before submitting to a journal or press.

But sometimes, some extra help is needed—especially for problem articles that you’ve been struggling with for years, or for early career researchers navigating the thesis-to-book shift.

Here are some common situations where you can benefit from developmental editing for academic books and journal articles:

Sign 1: You’re unsure about your argument

Identifying arguments and choosing which to articulate is one of the most common issues I navigate as a developmental editor for researchers. It’s very common, especially when writing ethnography (where the arguments emerge from the tangle of experience), to have a buried argument lurking in a chapter or journal article. Alternatively, sometimes there are too many arguments and deciding which ones to foreground and which to remove or let slip into the background is the challenge.

Sign 2: You’ve receive feedback saying “interesting but needs work”

Not all academics give useful structural feedback. Some want to rework your writing to fit their agenda and interests; others focus on the fine details but miss the bigger picture. And sometimes reviewer feedback can pull your writing in lots of different, contradictory directions.

In this situation, feedback from a developmental editor can help clarify the message you want to convey, and how that relates to the themes, concepts, and arguments already present in your draft.

Sign 3: The chapters work individually but not together

For book manuscripts (and yes, this includes edited volumes), thematic coherence across the chapters is essential for creating a book, rather than a loose collection of somewhat disconnected texts. Articulating thematic threads and working on appropriate ways of connecting and linking up each chapter is another key task for developmental editors, and a particularly satisfying one at that!

Sign 4: You’re still writing for examiners, not readers

As I discussed in the blog post on thesis-to-book projects, early career academics often struggle to lose the mindset of writing for their examiners rather than for a disciplinary (or wider) audience. Overly defensive writing and long summaries (literature reviews) and long justification (rather than brief description) of methods used are common problems I encounter.

Sign 5: You keep revising sentences but avoid big changes

Some writers are tuned into big-picture aspects of a text, others are hyperfocused on the details. For the detail oriented among you, this can translate into an obsession with copyediting concerns at the expense of considering appropriate big changes to make to the organization of your text.

This can result in a lot of wasted time and energy, for instance, if you fine-tune a section only to remove it later. The golden rule of all editing is to edit from the large to the small. First the big-picture, developmental aspects (arguments, concepts, cohesion, structure) and then on to the stylistic and technical aspects such as grammar, punctuation, etc.

So do I need developmental editing?

To be clear, not every project needs developmental editing. If your structure is clear, you've identified your arguments, and feedback mainly concerns clarity at the sentence level, copyediting (if anything) may be more appropriate.

But if any of the above apply, and you’re working on a particularly important project, then you may want to engage a developmental editor to help you with restructuring and reorganizing your manuscript. This might involve mapping out the arguments, concepts, and thematic threads, identifying redundant sections or paragraphs, uncovering conceptual gaps in your argument that could trip the reader up, etc. If you're unsure when to bring a developmental editor in on your project, you can find some more tips here.