A Guide to Developmental Editing for Academic Manuscripts

In September, the academic editing book club will meet online to discuss Make Your Manuscript Work: A Guide to Developmental Editing for Scholarly Writers by Laura Portwood-Stacer. This book club is run by the Academic Editing special interest group (SIG), a collaboration of Editors Canada and the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA). 

About the book

Make Your Manuscript Work: A Guide to Developmental Editing for Scholarly Writers by Laura Portwood-Stacer is a comprehensive guide that walks scholarly authors through the scholarly publishing and developmental editing processes for book-length manuscripts. Although this book is targeted toward authors who may want to conduct a developmental edit of their own manuscripts, the book’s step-by-step breakdown would be valuable to any academic editor, whether new or experienced, involved in the manuscript development process. 

The developmental editing process

What makes this book such a good resource for authors and editors alike is the recommended process for developmental editing itself, which comprises the essence of the book. Portwood-Stacer splits this process into three phases that focus on (I) clarifying the goals and intended audience for the book, (II) evaluating opportunities for future development according to the proposed four pillars of scholarly writing (i.e., argument, evidence, structure and style), and (III) creating and executing an editorial plan for developmentally editing the manuscript. Through these phases, this book lays out a clear, actionable and intentional strategy for engaging with the developmental editing of a scholarly manuscript, which could provide a useful framework for academic editors either implementing or articulating the manuscript development process.

Make Your Manuscript Work also explores norms and considerations in the scholarly publishing process (e.g., deciding on appropriate publishers and creating a realistic timeline that accounts for publisher needs, constraints on an author’s time and energy, and the schedules of external readers) that would be useful for editors helping scholarly writers navigate these questions. It’s possible that reading this book will shift how academic editors collaborate with scholarly writers in the developmental editing process. I envision that it could even be quite effective for both the editor and the author to work through the processes recommended in Make Your Manuscript Work together.

The discussions in the book, such as discerning a central argument and contribution, providing an appropriate amount of evidence, signposting through chapter and header titles and balancing the author’s voice with that of other scholars, are quite specific to book-length scholarly manuscripts. However, I believe the concepts, particularly the four pillars of scholarly writing, also apply more broadly to other types of academic writing. In the developmental editing process delineated in the book, Portwood-Stacer recommends assessing the writing’s argument, then its evidence, then its structure, then its style, which streamlines the developmental editing process by forcing the author (or the editor) to make high-level recommendations before paying attention to sentence-level adjustments. I’ll likely be considering this pipeline every time I read through a scholarly manuscript in my work going forward (and I’m literally keeping some of her recommendations in mind for myself as I write this blog post!).

Final thoughts

If an editor can only engage with a limited amount of Make Your Manuscript Work before the academic editing book club, I recommend reading the introduction, the brief description of each phase of the developmental editing process, and the table of contents, which might provide you with enough of an overview of the book to engage with the book club’s discussion (a strategy that Portwood-Stacer actually recommends when discussing developing a text’s structure). Additionally, if I could recommend just one chapter, I think that reading chapter 4, “Opportunities to Develop Your Argument,” would provide a good sense of the methods discussed in this book. That being said, I think editors will find it worthwhile to read the whole book, if they have time. Overall, Make Your Manuscript Work is a very comprehensive resource that could help academic editors learn more about the separate components of a scholarly manuscript and explore a new process for manuscript development. 

Join the discussion

The academic editing book club will host Laura Portwood-Stacer, author of Make Your Manuscript Work, in conversation with Alex Crawley of Lodestar Editing & Coaching for a Q&A event. Bring your questions and curiosity; leave with insight you can use in your next project!

We’ll see you on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET. Register for the event to join the conversation. 

The Editors’ Weekly is the official blog of Editors Canada. Contact us.