Most editing takes longer than clients expect—not because editors are slow, but because editing isn’t one thing. The Editorial Freelancers Association and Editors Canada both recognize a progression of distinct editorial tasks, each requiring a different kind of attention. Collapsing them into a single pass produces work that’s been touched everywhere and fixed nowhere in particular.
Substantive Editing
The most intensive level. Substantive editing addresses a document’s structure and argument before the prose is polished: whether the sections are in the right order, whether the reasoning holds, whether the intended audience will be able to follow it. A substantive edit often involves reorganizing material, flagging gaps or contradictions, and returning comments the author has to act on before revision. It is not line editing.
Stylistic Editing
Where structure meets sentence. Stylistic editing improves clarity, flow, and consistency of voice at the paragraph and sentence level—untangling constructions that are grammatically correct but hard to read, smoothing transitions, eliminating redundancy. This is the level at which a document begins to sound like itself.
Copyediting
The level most people picture when they think of editing. Copyediting catches and corrects errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, and usage, and enforces consistency throughout—including compliance with a house or client style guide. On complex documents with multiple authors, this also means resolving inconsistencies in terminology, formatting, and usage that accumulate when no one is watching the whole.
Proofreading
The final pass, conducted against a formatted or near-final document. Proofreading is not a light copyedit—it’s a check for errors introduced during layout or revision: dropped words, broken formatting, inconsistent headers, pagination problems. It assumes the copyediting is done.
Style Guide Development
Jennifer has written editorial style guides for two organizations: the PK–Grade 5 mathematics curriculum at Great Minds (now the basis for Eureka Math) and the Technical Communications Division at LSU’s National Center for Biomedical Research and Training. Both were built the same way: audit existing materials for inconsistencies, make the implicit judgment calls explicit, and write guidance that non-editors can actually apply. A good style guide is a decision record as much as a reference document.
How Jennifer Works
Editorial feedback lands better when it’s legible. Jennifer uses tracked changes in Word throughout, so authors can see exactly what changed and why, accept or reject each decision, and ask questions in the margin. On documents with multiple rounds, this also creates a record that makes revision easier to manage.
Beyond the markup, she works directly with subject matter experts, task leads, and freelance clients—in Word comments, in Teams calls, or both—to explain the reasoning behind edits, coach authors through patterns that keep recurring, and catch issues before they compound across a long document. The goal is a cleaner draft next time, not just a cleaner draft this time.
Tools
- Document editing and production: Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Adobe Acrobat
- Collaboration and data: SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Meet, Power BI, Excel
- Web and version control: HTML, CSS, Git, GitHub, VS Code
- Graphics handling: Pixelmator Pro
- Writing and editing tools under active evaluation: PerfectIt, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot