Structural editing (what some call developmental editing) mainly takes imagination and nerve
Line editing mainly takes rationality, even though the results can seem primarily aesthetic (better “flow” results from better logic and serialization)
Copy editing mainly takes taste
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I’m probably A-, C+, and B+ on those 3. Often I’ll come up with a bold and imaginative way to present an argument but get defeated by the effort of putting the small pieces together intelligently
Or I’ll come up with pretty sentences and phrases that don’t roll up to an essay
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Main thing with structural editing is willingness to throw away large blocks of text, compress entire pages into a few dense lines, and expand a few dense lines into entire pages. It’s a barbaric process. If texts were beasts, structural editing would be butchery and torture.
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