Editing

Leanne is editor of the Lake of the Woods Area News and a member of Editors Canada. 

Different types of editing

 Business content

Besides strengthening the power of the writing, our editing services can help give a fresh perspective to a business client’s work. You may be so deep into the weeds of business or projects that you can’t see you way out to deliver a more marketable, relevant or compelling piece. Let us help – people need to hear your story.

Manuscripts

Manuscript evaluation

A manuscript evaluation is a straightforward constructive review that includes looking at the manuscript overall and advising where it can be improved. It includes suggesting edits to strengthen the overall story. You might be looking for an evaluation of what you are doing well, along with someone to point out the challenges you need to address to make your story more publisher-ready. Manuscript evaluation can be helpful if you have a good first draft of your manuscript but aren’t sure of next steps, and may be on a more limited budget. It includes some developmental and structural editing but at a higher level, leaving it to you to address the strengths and challenges identified in the evaluation.  

We again, often suggest this as a first step when authors come to us and are not sure what kind of an edit they require. We request a couple of chapters to assess if a manuscript evalution would be the best option, or if your manuscript is ready for more advanced editing.

The following are provided with credit to Editor’s Canada.

Developmental edit

A developmental editor looks at the big-picture issues in a manuscript and does a thorough manuscript evaluation to make sure your story has strong strong motivations for characters, believable plot points, powerful tension, and interesting themes.

Structural edit

A structural editor reads the entire manuscript and gives advice on what kind of structures might best suit the kind of story you are telling. Some considerations might include flashbacks to help give a backstory for a character. Or perhaps too many flashbacks are distracting the reader’s attention. The structural editor might also comment on the amount and length of your chapters and the book’s length.

Line edit

Line editing (often called “stylistic editing”) focuses on prose from a content and flow perspective, and will consider word choice, sentence structure, the tense chosen, and how scenes and images are described. A line editor will be looking at your prose from a style perspective rather than a mechanical perspective like a copy editor will.

Copy edit

A copy editor reviews the entire manuscript at the sentence level, looking for errors like typos, inconsistencies, or confusing sentence structures that affect readability. Copy editors are often called mechanical editors since they aren’t concerned with the content of the story as much as the correctness of the language.

Ghost writing 

Ghost writing includes writing some or all portions of a manuscript, drawing from and building upon your ideas, research and publishing goals.

Proofreading

Proofreading the final draft of a manuscript, article or any content meant for public eyes is a critical final step. Pieces that are rife with errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, or even just sloppy typing are caught by most publishers (and readers) and can immediately lower their perception and appreciation of the quality of the work and its creator. MightyWrite’s Leanne Fournier is the first to say she needs a proofreader for her work and has a stable of top notch proofreaders she can assign to any project. 

Editing work samples

Leanne and her talented colleague Cassandra Filice often review each other’s work in the spirit of getting messages about good writing out to the world.

Leanne is a ghost writer and editor for a lot of really smart people. The following editing project, not available online, is included with permission.

Lake of the Woods Area News

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You need to be a member to get this magazine but Leanne is very proud of the quality of each issue, since taking over (and filling some very big shoes). Here’s a favourite articles (by Leanne, edited by Leanne). You can read more of Leanne’s articles in the magazine in Articles.