Developmental Editing: How to Find the Narrative Arc

If you want to master developmental editing, whether in your own work or editing someone else's, this is the course for you. The focus will be on non-fiction writing, but many of the points can be useful for editing fiction writing as well (I do both).

In this course, we will begin with an overview of all types of editing. Then we take a deep dive into developmental editing, where we will look at how to organize information, different ways to read the text, and techniques for creating a narrative flow out of any argument. Finally, we will touch on line editing and look at some classic blunders that make a piece less readable and how to avoid them.

After completing this course, you should be able to take any piece of writing, figure out its main flow, decide on the most compelling way to present the information, argument, or story, identify which details are most pertinent and/or interesting and which are superfluous or off-message, and decide how to put it all back together into a cohesive piece.

An editor is like a lawyer for the piece, and we want to do our best to make our clients come out looking as good as they can, including and especially if we are our own clients.