The Difference Between a Reviewer and an Editor · 1:55am Aug 10th, 2014
I have frequently heard complaints by various members of various review groups that people seem to frequently not understand the difference between a pre-reader, an editior, and a reviewer. Indeed, I have heard complaints from a number of reviewers that it is frustrating to them when people send in stories which are badly in need of editing, and then complain when the reviewer does not give them detailed feedback calling out specific grammatical errors. Unfortunately, many of the people who are sending in stories which are most in need of an editor are those who are the least familiar with the terminology used in literary circles, and many groups don’t seem to do a very good job of explaining this to laymen.
A Reviewer Judges A Published Work
When we talk about reviewers in the literary sense, very often what we are actually discussing are critics – that is to say, people who take it upon themselves to review a work in order to better inform the audience about it, and help them to make the choice as to whether or not they should spend the time and money necessary to consume said work. Perhaps the most well-known form of critic is the movie critic, people like the late Roger Ebert, who wrote reviews of movies so that people could choose whether or not to go see them themselves. These reviews, ultimately, are not written for the person whose work they are reviewing, but a wider audience; they are meant to steer people towards good works and steer them away from poor ones. While their criticism may help the producer of a work make something better in the future, that is not their primary intent. Several examples of this sort of review exist in the fandom – they vary from the Pony Fiction Vault and Royal Canterlot Library, which also seek to enlighten readers about the production of the work and the nature of writing, to groups such as The Royal Guard and Seattle’s Angels, who try and steer people towards good stories and tell them why they should read them.
An acquisitions editor is someone whose job it is to comb and find stories which meet their criteria for inclusion or promotion in their publication. The aim of these people is to determine whether or not something is worthy of inclusion, typically to be enjoyed by their audience. These people may or may not give feedback to a submitter, but as their primary goal is to comb through the hopefuls and separate the wheat from the chaff, they are likely not to give much feedback unless they liked a submission but felt that it needed to be improved before they could accept it. In the real world, these are the people you interact with when you try to sell a story or article to a magazine. In the fandom, these people are given many names – Equestria Daily refers to them as pre-readers, while Twilight’s Library refers to them as admins and contributors. Note that in some cases – as with The Royal Guard and Seattle’s Angels, the role of a critic and acquisitions editor are merged – they are both seeking good works, and publishing reviews about them in their publication. Note that despite the presence of the word “editor” in their name, their goal is not to edit your work – rather, they are working as editors for the group or publication that they are working for, deciding what to include and exclude.
Judges are people who review stories for contests and competitions. Judges may be anyone, from a select group of people who are hand-picked for the task, to members of the general public who can be bothered to vote in a competition. These tend to be more transitory positions, set up for specific competitions or contests. The goal of a judge is to determine which story is the best or best meets the criteria of a competition. They may or may not review the stories that they judge, but will almost always hand out some sort of numerical score or order stories in placement. The ultimate goal of a judge is to determine what story amongst a list of entrants is the best, and to award the winner or winners with whatever prizes were on offer, be they actual prizes or mere promotion.
In all of these cases, the person reading the story is judging it, and is typically not doing so for the direct benefit of the author, but for the audience at large – while they may incidentally aid the author via their review of the work, typically their review is meant to help the audience decide how to spend their time (and outside of the fandom, money), helping them decide what to buy. Submitting unedited stories to said groups tends to be viewed by them as tiresome and disrespectful of their time – their goal is to separate the chaff from the wheat, not to help burgeoning writers improve their craft, and they tend to get tired of weak submissions which are not much fun to read and which have no hope of winning their approval.
An Editor Improves An Unpublished Work
An editor is someone whose job it is to improve an unpublished work. In the professional world, there are many types of editor, but in the fandom, these all tend to blend together.
A copy editor is a professional editor whose job it is to look for technical writing errors. They are focused on finding spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, awkwardly worded sentences, poor word choice, and potential sources of confusion or ambiguity. Their goal is to make a manuscript as perfect as possible, but no one is perfect; to win certification from many groups, you need to be able to catch at least 80% of errors in a manuscript, and the best copy editors catch as many as 95% of mistakes. Note that this means that the more error-ridden your document is to begin with, the more likely it is that errors will remain in the final document; this means that you, as a writer, should edit your own work as much as possible before sending it off to be read by a proof-reader, as they will not catch everything, and the fewer errors exist in a work when you send it off, the fewer will exist in a final work. This sort of editor is vitally important for improving technical writing – that is to say, making your piece more perfect.
When dealing with non-professional editors, you should not expect them to be nearly as good as a professional copy editor, especially given that they’re usually doing it for free or trade (i.e. they read over your work, and in exchange, you read over theirs). As such, it is even more important that you find every error you can and fix it before you hand it over to someone else to be read.
A proofreader is a close relative of a copy editor; they read over a document immediately prior to publication in order to detect production errors in the document. They look for errors in copying the work to the final document, misaligned paragraphs, errors in art reproduction, typos, and misspelled words, but they aren't looking for larger issues; their job is to prevent little mistakes from creeping in in the final stages of production. As with copy editors, proofreaders are expected to have a very high degree of accuracy, and are usually the final editor to handle a document before it is published. The usage of the term proofreader is not entirely consistent even within professional circles, and is highly inconsistent outside of professional publication; when a fan writer refers to a proofreader, they are almost always referring to a copy editor.
A developmental or substantive editor, frequently referred to just as an editor, is someone who tends to take a broader view of a work. In the professional world, these people may be working continuously with a writer as they go, helping them improve their work, guiding them towards interesting subject matter, or they may come in later on in the process and work to help fact check the work, make sure that the overall pacing of a work is correct, look for inconsistencies or points of discontinuity in a larger piece, help make sure that the theme or lesson of a work is apparent, or otherwise take a bigger, more broad-scale look at a work. These folks are incredibly valuable for actually improving the craft of storytelling – they help you with the bigger issues, help you notice when a section isn’t as engaging as it should be or point out that some idea you had is a good one and should be expanded on or followed up.
In the fandom, most of the time, editors are some combination of the above, and are expected to do both. As such, it is advisable to polish the grammar and spelling in your story as much as possible before you hand it over to someone else for editing; not only does pointing out spelling and grammatical errors make it harder for the person to get into your story and give you good feedback on how good a piece is, but it also is more respectful of their time and means that they can spend more time focusing on the macro issues.
Sometimes, pre-readers are distinguished from all of the above as someone who reads over a story and gives overall feedback on the piece. Note, however, that this usage is highly inconsistent; some people, when they say they are looking for a pre-reader, are really looking for someone to quickly read over a piece and give them some general feedback, while others are asking for you to edit the work, and still others are looking for more of a developmental editor when they ask for a pre-reader, someone who takes a more macro view rather than getting into the nitty gritty of sentence structure.
Editors are vitally important not only to improving your work, but also to improving your ability as a writer; they give you the most in-depth and specific feedback, and a particularly good editor may be able to make specific suggestions which help you see how to write better and teach you how to make a better story, or how to make your existing story sound much better. But remember that if someone is volunteering to be your editor, you are asking them to spend their time helping you; don’t be pushy or disrespectful towards them, and always remember that you are ultimately the most important editor of your work – you need to edit your work before you hand it over to others, so that you don’t waste their time picking out stuff that you yourself could fix, and instead work on the issues that you cannot see due to your proximity to or involvement with the story.
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I wish I had a reviewer so I can have one review my story before being published. So that way I can improve, know where the story went wrong, so that way the story can be good and polish when I publish it.
This. Pretty much all this. One of the major issues I have with editing is this right here. It becomes such a chore and bore to trudge through the same, and sometimes literally the exact same, errors over and over on a story that will be long running. I mean, there has to be a point in which someone notices the errors being pointed out and actually tries hard to not make that same mistake.
But overall, it just makes editing a very agonizing experience, one that takes far too long for me to even fully enjoy the story. Or chapter. I really wish people would try and become their own editor before seeking others.
But anyway, interesting post. This site has really shifted my definitions of things over time, so this post basically reminded me of how things really are.
Very informative and useful.
U is a bootiful person 4 making dis.
2357391
Gotta do something to help the people.
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This was a very interesting read. Thank you for sharing, Titanium.
I'm glad to see everything written out in detail. It really helps to explain the difference between reviewers, pre-readers, and editors.
Hmm, if you write blogs like this, then I think I ought to give you a follow. Very nice.
This, so much this. I love it.
2357307 Seconded. I have many times been tempted to blog about just this point. For beginners, it's okay to make grammatical mistakes. But only enough to learn the rules and stop making them. At least stop making them by accident.
I don't make grammatical corrections when I pre-read. Can't do both that and edit.
2357834
I assume when you say "At least stop making them by accident" you meant that if they write an ungrammatical sentence, it is because they messed up (omitted a word, made a typo, deleted half of a sentence and started rewriting it and then didn't clean up the first half of the sentence, or otherwise did something stupid and then didn't catch it) rather than because they thought that the sentence was grammatically correct as-is. If so, I wholeheartedly agree - everyone makes mistakes while writing, but if you can't tell if something is a mistake, you're going to have a hell of a time writing anything that doesn't bother people when they read it.
One thing I've never actually quite figured out is how to teach someone technical writing skills when they otherwise lack them - it has been such a long time since I learned how to construct grammatically correct sentences that I don't remember how I gained the ability to do so, and I've never really observed anyone else gradually picking up on them - it seems like most of the time, people either know how to do it, or they don't, and they don't seem to really improve much in that regard while under my direct observation. I would think that you would learn simply via absorption - reading stories and speaking with people - but it appears that it goes awry in some cases, and I'm not entirely sure what to recommend to someone when they are lacking in those skills. I can tell you how a story works, but I'm not sure if I can explain all of the rules of grammar in a manner which will actually help someone. It is not that they cannot be explained or pointed out, but that I'm not sure that memorization is really exactly how we learn grammar in the first place. I get a sense of unease when I look at a sentence and it is wrong, which seems like it necessitates a very deep level of integration.
2357981 It's not actually a style-book, but Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves does a pretty good job explain why grammar (specifically punctuation) is important. Then Elements of Style doesn't seem like such a bore.
2357981
I meant it's because they meant to do so. Sometimes bad grammar sounds better.
People can learn rules about how to do things from reading. They can't easily learn rules about how not to do things from reading, because they don't see negative examples--or, they do, but they are presented as positive examples. If you never see comma-spliced sentences, it's very hard to realize that you're not supposed to do that.
Other things are more surprising. Like the em dash. I did not believe in the em dash when an EQD editor told me about it. It looked bizarre. But I took books from my shelf and checked, and they were full of em dashes.
Or like the way some people keep writing
despite never having seen that in print. They're trying too hard, overgeneralizing some rule.
2358938
I find the emdash freaky looking; it just looks wrong to me. They decided to put the hyphen on the keyboard, and honestly, I feel like it does the job well enough for the emdash and the endash - if you use a hyphen with a space on either side of it, it works just fine as a stand-in for an endash or an emdash mid-sentence, and ending a sentence with a hyphen works as well as ending it with an emdash in my eyes.
Even though it is "wrong", I just don't think that the two additional punctuation marks really add anything. Not that I don't use emdashes in actual story writing, I just do it under protest.
Protest I tell you! Fight the power!
But I thought you said his name was Tom.
2359024
I told you he had a split personality.
They're not actually interchangeable. A copy editor does what you describe here. A proofreader takes the version submitted by the author and the typeset version, and looks for errors that crept in in converting the original to the typeset version. A proofreader would look at this post and point out that that "copy editor" and "proofreader" should be boldface in the quote, but they probably wouldn't point out that this sentence is awkwardly long and contains a self-referential digression that could be omitted, because that's not their job. Most of the authors who share their process indicate that they work with their editors (of whatever sort) over google docs, which suggests that they don't have any actual proofreaders. Judging by the number of times I've seen problems with importing a document make it into a published chapter (temporarily), most authors would probably benefit from an actual proofreader.
2359323
I just proofread my own documents, rather than have someone else do so. Generally I actually use three different things - my personal master copy (in word), a GDocs version which I edit and then export back into Word when I'm done, and then the copy on FIMFiction.
Thanks for the clarification regarding proofreaders; I shall fix that. I have been misleading people!
I followed you solely from reading this blog post.