I know, it was a bad title. That's sort of the point.

I need a bit of help. Well, depending who you ask I might need a lot but.... anyway!

Despite my rambling here, I'm willing and able to attempt to help edit random stuff for folks. However! I've never really edited anything besides my own work, for school, which was... longer ago than I'd like to admit. Point being, I'm not sure of the proper format to use to edit works.

The last person I helped; I copied the entire chapter, made my edits and then colored them, sent that whole thing back with a small added .txt file saying "This is why I made this edit." It only took approximately forever, but the writer didn't seem to mind. I did it that way so they could see my suggestion without feeling like I walked all over their carefully crafted work of art. I guess there must be some style guides out there somewhere but this isn't an academic setting. And, if you can't tell from my writing, anything too formal just doesn't work for me.

So, any helping hands.... hooves.... appendages, lets go with appendages, would be welcome.

Thanks!

6086328
The short answer is: it depends.

By and large, in my experience collaborative writing, including editing, is done via Google Docs, which is more or less designed to make it easy. Author has a document on Docs. If she wants to share it with people, she has choices to share it (1) just so they can see the thing, (3) so the recipient can make changes as if they were Author, and (2) (backtracking!) so the recipient can "comment" on the document, making notes on highlighted text or proposing changes that don't remove what is already there, which she can approve, reject, or discuss pending approval or rejection. A benefit of "commenting" is that all comments or suggestions are in-line, directly connected with the material in question, without resorting to such crude pointers as, "On the line that starts with 'Marble immediately decided he …'"; indeed, I frequently use that mode when writing for myself, to not accidentally clobber material and to organize my thoughts. However, GDocs is not the only collaborative writing tool, nor is it necessarily the best; just most common in my experience.

For how or what to edit, this will depend most significantly on what Author expects or asks of you. Sometimes, Author just wants a proof-reading pass to catch grammar and punctuation errors. Other times, Author might be open to prying, cutting, gouging comments that question the very fiber of the work. Most often, it won't be exactly clear, and a middle ground of "comment on things that occur to you" is a sound starting point as Editor and Author become comfortable with working together… or not, as case may be.

6086328 It's best to just edit the stories in GDoc. Here are my stories if you ever get too bored and want to edit the shit out of something:
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/713204/gdocs-of-my-stories

Thanks for the suggestions! If anyone has more to make I'm still all ears.