Mastering Nonfiction Editing: A Step-by-Step Guide for Writers (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hello, my name is Erica Westman and this video is about how to edit a work of nonfiction. Really, I want to talk to you if you have written a memoir, a biography, a science book, ecology, geography, history, about politics, economics, business, any of those nonfiction subjects that cover the endless fascinations of the real world. I'm challenging myself to keep this video under five minutes, which is no easy feat for a book lover because, as you know, books delve into the deeper issues of something. But this is the age of social media, so I'll keep it short. Here it goes. What the editor does can all be boiled down to one thing, and that's helping the writer establish their credibility. Have you ever read something that's riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes? You don't trust that writer as much as an expert. Have you read something that's got gaps in logic or factual errors? Even worse, you are not going to go back to that writer's work and trust that they know what they're talking about. The editor will flag up all of those things in your draft material so that, by the time your book gets out into the world, people will trust you as the expert in your field. Let me first show you this chart that shows the workflow for editing. Writers often turn their work over to an editor quite a few times before they feel satisfied that the work is ready to publish. Have a look at this. Now it's time to look at the first main stage of editing, and that is what's known as the structural edit, sometimes called substantive or developmental edit. And this is really about the organization and the content of your work.

Speaker 2: Once the major structural issues are dealt with by the author, you'll turn your work back to the

Speaker 1: editor to look at the style. The stylistic edit is mainly done to improve the clarity and the flow The stylistic edit is mainly done to improve the clarity and the flow of your work. By this point, your work should be in pretty good shape, and now it's time for stage three, which is the copy edit. The copy edit drills down into the very fine details to make sure that your work is correct, consistent, and accurate. And it's probably what most people think of when they think about editing. Here's my bookshelf of style guides, which I keep close to my desk. I've got Chicago Manual of Style, several volumes, the Canadian Press Stylebook, MLA, Editing Canadian English, the New York Public Library Style Guide. I've got my dictionaries and tools to check your use of punctuation, your commas, semicolons, colons, periods, apostrophes, exclamation marks, question marks, parentheses, em dashes, end dashes, hyphens, quotation marks. In addition to that, we check your grammar. We check spelling, any problematic words. There are quite a few of them that often get mixed up. We check your numbers, your units of measurement, abbreviations, statistics, logic, facts, web links, cross-reference the pages with table of contents and citations with the reference material. We check your visuals. We make sure that names of people and places are spelled accurately. We check titles. We check quotations and citations and captions below your images. We check your headings and subheadings. We identify if there are any missing elements and we also flag any copyrighted material and any permissions that haven't yet been sought out for your work. By the time you make all the corrections suggested in the copy edit, you should be pretty satisfied that your work is in very good shape. So, what happens next? You send your document to your publisher and they lay it out as it will look when it's printed. But there's one more stage where you need to edit. You need to check the proofs. You can hire an editor for this or your publisher might provide one depending on what kind of contract you have.

Speaker 2: I hope you found this useful. I'm always happy to talk with writers about their work so please

Speaker 1: do get in touch and scroll down to the bottom, like this, share this video, and best of luck with your writing.