Introduction to Developmental Editing at the University of Chicago: A Review

In spring 2026 I completed the University of Chicago’s Introduction to Developmental Editing course as part of their Editing Certificate (Developmental Editing Pathway). I wholeheartedly recommend it to practicing academic developmental editors, as well as to editors starting out.

Here are some thoughts directed at other editors who might take the course—especially established editors with lots of experience who may be wondering about the value of taking extra training.

This course suits editors at all experience levels, but what you'll get out of the course depends on your career stage. The assignments are structured like actual developmental editing jobs you might take on for a client. You can take the completed assignments, spruce them up if needed after receiving tutor feedback, and use them as samples for clients, should you ever need them.

I was also thrilled to have an academic developmental editor (Jenny Gavacs) teaching the course, because academic developmental editing courses and resources are few and far between.

What the developmental editing course involved

The course was five weeks long and was closely structured around Scott Norton’s new edition of Developmental Editing, which I have reviewed here. There were detailed required readings each week (always chapters from the Norton book) and then a course exercise to complete. This usually took me two to three hours, depending on the task complexity—except for the final assessment, which took me five to six hours.

There were no hidden surprises; the exercises were all highly practical and interesting. The texts ranged from trade nonfiction through to academic nonfiction (social sciences and humanities) and fiction (a literary thriller). If you're not interested in fiction, don't worry, there is only one compulsory fiction-focused assignment. But if you are interested in it, you can pick it for the final assignment too. We got to choose between a qualitative social sciences text or a historical novel, although the topics for the final assessment change, depending on who is teaching the course.

Because Jenny is an academic editor, and I’ve had a lot more feedback on my fiction developmental editing skills already, I opted for the academic assessment.

Perfectionism and academic conditioning

I noticed the course, which had a marking system, activated my perfectionist streak, and I had to work hard to stop that from getting out of control. As someone who was always top of the class in school and sometimes at university, I knew I had this vulnerability, but having not been graded for a while, it had slipped my mind.

I guarded against this by allowing myself a generous but fixed amount of time to complete each course assignment, and I made sure I didn’t drop into copyediting-style perfectionism with my sentences (knowing that while professional presentation and clarity is important, copy-perfect presentation is neither necessary nor expected for a DE report that remains a private document shared between two people).

Crucially, the mindset took me back to how I’d respond to university assignments and then peer feedback in journal articles. I remembered all these markers of recognition and distinction that had great value within those systems, but that aren’t visible to or decipherable by many outside academia: getting a summa cum laude or winning a disciplinary prize, or landing an article in a high-prestige journal.

And I think that’s a useful point to remember when working as an academic developmental editor because the vast majority of academics are operating at a very high level in an environment that is extremely competitive and elitist, and so any vulnerabilities, such as toward perfectionism, procrastination, working (too) hard, etc., can easily be magnified.

The live sessions

There were five live sessions and these were really great! Jenny made them very interactive with polls, group tasks, and breakout rooms. She also drew on the expertise of different group members across the different weeks, which I appreciated, as although the Editing Certificate is pitched as an entry-level certificate, several experienced editors took the course, including staff from Penguin Random House imprints and small presses.

Here were some concrete issues I clarified in my own practice:

• How and when the timeline rather than the arguments become the main organizing principle of a book (this is mostly true for narrative (trade) nonfiction, so it rarely comes up in my academic editing work).

• Some of the terms I use, and how I use them differently than Scott Norton.

• The limitations of Norton's book and approach, both in general (things he misses or how things could be approached differently), and as applied to academic developmental editing (because his experience appears to be mostly in trade nonfiction).

• Some minor differences in my approach and judgement calls compared with my tutor's, and how those differences might reflect US versus European publishing norms and reader expectations.

One other thing I learned from taking the developmental editing course is that my training in fiction developmental editing (where there is a lot more freedom, unconstrained by what actually happened, to engineer a manuscript to make the storytelling the best it can be) not only helps me edit ethnography (especially literary ethnography) better, but also helps me out with crossover and ethnographies published as trade books for a popular audience.

With that in mind, I’m currently reading Evicted by Matthew Desmond, published by Penguin, which is a study of tenants in low-income housing in the deindustrialized mid-sized city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is helping me apply the insights I learned about timelines versus arguments.

If you’d like to learn more about the course or sign up, you can do that here. Next up for me is the University of Chicago's Developmental Editing for Fiction course, which I plan to take in the fall or next spring.