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Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog 
Ironically, this infographic appears not to have been edited thoroughly. (Here’s how the section on structural editing should look: Structural editing fixes the basic elements of your story: the narrative drive, structure, pacing, and POV of the characters. Your story should be sound; these are the smaller changes that improve a book’s flow.) I cannot help but notice these things…
Many writers seem to think that the only editing that matters at all is at the developmental/structural level; grammar and punctuation and spelling are trivial, they say, and readers neither know nor care about such things, so there’s no point in bothering with any of that. Structural editing is important; if the story is full of plot holes, or if the POV changes back and forth within a single paragraph, there’s no point in fixing the punctuation… yet. On the other hand, the best story idea in the world doesn’t do any good if the actual writing contains errors in nearly every sentence.
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Great infographic, says it all in concise language. And ironically (not! lol), that’s what good writing is supposed to do! I have to say that my services include all of that, because I can’t look at just one area in the whole editing scheme. Even if someone were to hire me for, say, proofing only, if I found *anything* that fell into the other categories, I could not, in good conscience, not point it out. Thanks for this post, Chris…excellent reminder of everything that goes into editing one’s work.
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My pleasure, Em 👍😃
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Perfect timing on this reminder – I just finished the first draft of a novel yesterday! I’m on break from it through the weekend (ha – wishful thinking – I’ll be back at it by Saturday at the latest). Then, on to editing!
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Good Luck with it, Sarah 😃
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Thanks! I feel it’s a good sign that I’m actually looking forward to the edits. I think the ones I have in mind will make a huge improvement.
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When I first started writing, I thought editing referred to grammar and spelling only. Who knew there was so much to writing a novel 🙂
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Yep 😃
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