
The Rigel Affair is a collaboration with I. M. Hedrick and Mark Graham Communications
Content editing is the art of working on the language of someone’s manuscript and enhancing, where appropriate, everything from the storyline of a novel and the details of a memoir to the presentation in a business book and the style components of the self-help book.
A talented content editor is much rarer than you might think, because he or she must raise the presentation of a manuscript while honoring the voice that the author has created. Content editing can focus on very specific style elements, such as changing the voice of a piece from passive voice to active voice where appropriate, to more aggressive responses, such as adding descriptive passages where clearly needed in a biography or filling obvious holes in action scenes of a suspense novel.
Content editing is an art form in many ways. To heavy of a hand and the editor threatens to overwhelm the essence of a piece and mask the heart and soul of author’s original intent; to light of a hand and the editor may fail to take the material in question to its highest level of presentation, which, of course, is the ultimate goal.