A Three-Phase Workflow for Efficient Manuscript Editing

I once had a friend show me a draft of a manuscript that her mentor had just returned after the first round of editing. The mentor had a very particular writing style, and so I wasn’t surprised when she showed me a page that had been heavily rewritten, with words exchanged for synonyms and sentences rearranged. 

The surprising part was in the margin where the mentor had written, “Delete this entire section.” It was darkly humorous to see the amount of time wasted editing the details of this passage, particularly from a mentor who had little time to spare.

While the example I described above was particularly egregious, I have seen similar issues in almost every paper I’ve been involved in writing or editing. At the point in which I found myself committing the same crimes against efficiency, I decided it was time to develop a formal workflow to streamline the editing process, if only for myself. I did this by adapting the workflow used by editors of fiction in the publishing industry, with extra steps and modifications to accommodate the differences between the different types of publications. 

This workflow has worked well to keep me from wasting time and energy editing the wrong aspects of a paper, and I think it will work for anyone.

To be clear: when I refer to editors throughout this article I’m referring to informal editing of a colleague’s paper, not to professional editing services such as those offered by AJE. Professional editing services normally define their role very carefully to maintain ethical boundaries concerning authorship of scholarly works and therefore will not comment on all the aspects of the paper that I outline below. The editing that I’m discussing here is the advice that you would give a labmate or collaborator after reading their manuscript.

The three phases for effective manuscript editing

1. Research review: This phase simply involves evaluating the research. Such evaluation includes determining whether the literature of the field has been interpreted correctly, whether the methods chosen were appropriate for the questions asked, whether the methods were executed correctly and generated unambiguous results, and whether the conclusions drawn from those results are robust. Ultimately, I ask “Does the data in the paper support the title?”
   
2. Structural editing: This phase addresses the story-telling aspect of the manuscript. Here, I address the larger structural aspects of the paper, asking whether any additional background information should be included, whether any background or discussion sections should or could be deleted, and whether the information or data is presented in the best sequence for the reader to understand it. At this phase, I also consider any length limitations imposed by the journal the author intends to submit to and make recommendations accordingly.
   
3. Line editing: At this stage, details of phrasing, transitions between paragraphs, and grammar are addressed. In addition, the references are finalized, finding citations for any general, “everybody knows…” statements, and all the publication requirements regarding affiliations, funding sources, and acknowledgements are verified as being reported correctly.

The three phases above deal with aspects of a manuscript that you evaluate already, so why divide the aspects up and only address one at a time? 

The most obvious reason is disruptiveness, which is why I have ordered the phases as I have. The phases are not in order of importance - all the phases are critical to produce a high-quality paper – but, rather, they are ordered according to how disruptive the changes at each phase would be to the other aspects of the manuscript. 

Any time spent performing structural or line edits to a manuscript that still has major scientific issues could easily be wasted when additional research changes the direction of the paper and those edited sections are removed or fundamentally rewritten.

However, there is another, less obvious reason to divide the editing into phases: it is easy to start line editing a manuscript and miss the larger fundamental problems with the research or the structure of the paper. By the time you get to the end of the paper and find that you have made a lot of comments in it, it can be easy to think, “that’s enough changes for one round of editing,” and never uncover these other, larger issues with the manuscript.

Determination of phase

My first rule is "listen to the authors."

I’ve found that most of the time, the authors themselves relay this information, but it often isn’t considered by their colleagues. Many authors will have very specific questions they would like addressed that correlate nicely with the phases I’ve outlined above, while others give clues with statements like, “This is my first draft,” or, “We would like to submit next week” that tell you which phase they would like you to focus on. When authors don’t volunteer this information, I usually ask a few questions to try to pull this information out of them.

However, the author does not always give you a clear indication of what stage the manuscript is in; what do you do then? Personally, I start from the beginning of the phases, reading the manuscript and focusing on the research aspect of the paper. 

As I mentioned previously, I resist the urge to line edit the manuscript as I read it, focusing more on what the author is trying to say rather than how I might phrase their statements differently. If I finish this phase believing that the fundamental research of the paper is sound and reasonably complete, then I will read through the manuscript again to consider the structural aspects of the paper. If again I don’t have any large changes to suggest for this phase, then I move on to line editing. 

It may sound like it would waste a lot of time to get to the line edits if the research and structural aspects of the paper are sound, but I’ve found that in these cases, the line editing goes much faster than it would if you were attempting to line edit the manuscript as you were reading it for the first time.

If I find at the conclusion of the research or structural phases that I am suggesting some rather large, disruptive changes to the manuscript, then I stop and relay these comments to the author along with an explicit statement letting them know I did not line edit the manuscript. In addition to saving effort on my end, this also helps the author focus on these larger issues rather than just getting lost in line-editing corrections.

Using this system, I was often able to substantially reduce the amount of time I spent editing colleagues’ manuscripts without ever receiving complaints about the thoroughness of my edits. If anything, I think that preventing myself from being distracted by line-editing allowed me to provide more insightful feedback about the state of a manuscript than I was capable of before.