Whether someone needs developmental editing depends on the person and their manuscript and their goals for the manuscript. If you’re just writing because it makes you happy and you don’t care about making money, or because you just want to share your story with your family, maybe you don’t need it. If you’re creating a book out of a course (which is already structured well and pretty much acts as a detailed outline), maybe you don’t need it. If you prefer to use beta readers and critique partners to help you get the organization down, maybe you don’t need it.

It's totally up to you, your goals, your budget, and your timeline.

I edit lots of memoirs, so I see lots of common developmental problems. If you can fix these before you get your book to an editor, the editor can focus on other issues, which results in a better book. Maybe after implementing these changes and working with beta readers, you even feel comfortable skipping developmental editing altogether and saving some time and money!

Here’s three common mistakes of memoir writers. Let’s get into it.

There is a lot that goes into writing a book. Then, after you finish writing the book, there’s still a million more things to do! I hope this post will help you stay on track and take all the necessary steps to publish your book.

You were probably taught this in school at some point, but it’s important, so let’s go over it again. Simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences, and compound-complex sentences are four basic types of sentence structure. Some people only know one or two types of sentence structure, which makes for really boring writing! It’s so repetitive!

Punctuation can get really tricky! This post talks about how to use parentheses properly.

Introductions are a crucial part of most nonfiction books (and some fiction books). Introductions talk about the subject material and give the reader any background information they may need before diving into the book. This way, you can start chapter one with the actual chapter one content rather than explaining terms and concepts in chapter one needed throughout the entire book.

Point of view is the perspective from which the story is being told. Your choice of point of view can really change your story, so it’s important to make an educated decision. (This post isn’t going to go deep into all the points of view—because there are a lot—I’ll just touch on the top four most popular and most general.)

Most people don’t know the difference between proofreading and editing, but these services are very different. For example, they should be done at different times in the publishing process, they work with different kinds of files, and their scope of work is vastly different. If you’re unsure which one you need, read below to find out the difference between proofreading and editing.

Lists come up in writing all the time when you want to keep together multiple items. They can be made up of words, phrases, or entire clauses. For the list to make the most sense and flow well, each item in the list needs to be parallel to the others. This means each item of the list must make sense independently with the list introduction. That’s confusing. Here’s an example.

Citing sources is essential to playing it fair in writing! Imagine spending a ton of time and effort to putting together a document of your own ideas based on your own research, and then someone comes along and pretends it’s their work. All they did was slap their name on your paper, and now they get all the credit! Unfair! That’s exactly what you’re doing to other people when you don’t cite your sources. Whether you’re directly quoting or paraphrasing someone else’s ideas, give credit where credit is due. Always. Another reason for citing sources, other than giving credit to others for their ideas, is to allow the readers to find those sources for more information. If you read a book with a lot of amazing quotes originating from a single book, you might be interested in reading that book. But you wouldn’t be able to do that if you didn’t know which book it came from.

It may seem easier and cheaper to have an all-in-one editor, this way you get all the editing done in one go. Let me tell you why you shouldn’t do this.

Proper punctuation is really important! Today we will be learning about colons.

It’s very rare that someone intentionally goes out to exclude someone through their writing, and most people don’t mean to throw in sexist stereotypes when they’re writing a book. And yet it happens every day. . . . Why is this? And more importantly, what can we do about it?