As we discussed in Unit 8, the entire team can make the most of your Full Manuscript Developmental Edit by handing in chapters that are as complete as possible.

During the first two weeks of Unit 10, Lead Authors have a special role to play in pulling the parts of the manuscript together into a whole. Lead authors maintain consistency in content, voice, and vision. The information in this section might be useful to any author, but will definitely be relevant to Lead Authors.

Readability Tools

Lead Authors read all chapters for consistency and make sentence-level edits where styles differ enough that they may be distracting to a student reader.

Instructional Editor Stephanie Lenox recommends optionally using Readability Scoring System [Website], a free, online automatic readability checker, to pinpoint why passages may feel different from each other. Paste in a sample of text and click “check text readability.” Pay particular attention to the “Readability Consensus” score at the bottom of the results page.

A sufficient sample size consists of 4-5 full sentences (approximately 200-600 words total; max. 3,000 words). For larger texts, pull 1-2 samples from each chapter.

Checking readability can be particularly helpful for lead authors to test samples written by different authors in the same chapter. You can also use it to ensure that readability will be consistent across chapters written by different authors.

Revision Tools

Revision tools are just that – tools. They can’t substitute for human decision-making, but they can make suggestions and process large amounts of information quickly. Lead authors can optionally use these tools to get the most out of their time on this project.

Instructional Editor Stephanie Lenox recommends the free version of ProWritingAid [Website], which has an extension for Google Docs. The summary report will check spelling, grammar, and style and give you scores on 20 other areas of your writing, including the frequency of passive voice, jargon, long sentences, and other issues that impact readability.

The project budget can pay for you to access Grammarly Premium [Website] if chapters in your manuscript need in-depth, sentence-level revision. You can try out the free version of Grammarly on your own.

The support team can also help you access Turnitin [Website] if you notice that chapters are missing citations or attributions. Turnitin is best known as a plagiarism checker, but it is also a useful tool as an originality checker. In this developmental stage, you can use it to look for content that needs to be cited or attributed so that the original author receives credit.

Communication with Your Team

Authors on this project are busy people, and that can make it difficult to get a quick reply when you’re on a deadline. That’s why Lead Authors have the final say on what goes into the manuscript.

While it’s nice to get your contributing authors’ approval for changes you make to their writing, it’s not necessary at this stage. Please make sure that your contributing authors are aware that in the days leading up to the full manuscript deadline, you may need to edit their chapters, move incomplete content to the Parking Lot, or make last-minute decisions for consistency. They have another chance to revise their chapters after the Developmental Review.

The exception to this rule is if a contributor is submitting a personal vignette; any changes to these must be reviewed and approved by the Contributing Author.

Licenses and Attributions for Prepare for the Full Manuscript Developmental Edit

Open content, original

“Prepare for the Full Manuscript Developmental Edit” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Open content, shared previously

“Prepare for the Full Manuscript Developmental Edit” is adapted from Manuscript Checklist for Lead Authors by Stephanie Lenox for Chemeketa Press, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Figure Y1 10.2. Colporteur at French Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.