While you’re starting your next chapter, your Developmental Editor is busy preparing feedback on your author team’s first chapters. The editor will provide your team with a detailed report called {Course #} Half Manuscript Draft Developmental Edit Feedback. This document aligns with our criteria for success: learner focus, representation of diverse voices, accessibility, and Oregon context. It also identifies specific priorities for revision, focusing on the areas that are most urgent and relevant to the success of the project. This report will guide not only your revision of your first chapter, but your team’s approach to the rest of the manuscript. It is intended to help these first chapters serve as models for the chapters to come.

Sometimes authors can feel daunted by the task of revising. Feedback usually means more work! It can feel uncomfortable to accept that your chapter needs to change, especially if you put extra time into sections that matter the most to you. It is normal to feel unsettled, excited, and even overwhelmed with detail at this stage. Remember that you and your coauthors have an enthusiastic support team cheering you on.

Before you begin to implement changes, meet as a team with your Project Manager and Developmental Editor to discuss the developmental edit feedback. This meeting serves as an orientation to the feedback itself as well as a planning meeting so you can act on the feedback efficiently. You will discuss the feedback on each of your chapters to help improve the manuscript as a whole. Bring your questions!

At the meeting, the Project Manager will help you create a realistic timeline to benchmark progress on the remaining chapters. Based on the Developmental Edit Feedback, you will complete the “Chapter Draft Revision Actions” tab of the Deliverables spreadsheet. If there are undone to-do’s from the “Chapter Draft To-Dos” tab, you can move them over to the “Actions” tab to make sure that all to-dos get done by the end of Unit 9. We recommend making any edits your team needs in this tab to make it work for you!

Note that Chapter Self-Review is one of your revision actions already on your spreadsheet. We’ll cover how to do this in Unit 10.

The support team is ready to help you respond to your revision priorities. You can email the Project Manager directly to be connected with the right person for your revision query.

Workflow for the Developmental Edit

The steps below describe the process for receiving your developmental edit:

1. The Developmental Editor receives the chapter drafts and makes comments in the doc in “suggesting” mode. The Developmental Editor also summarizes notes in the {Course #} Half Manuscript Draft Developmental Edit Feedback document.
2. Authors read the Developmental Editor’s notes and re-read chapters with in-text comments soon after receiving them because questions and solutions will likely come up that will help with other chapters you’re working on.
3. The Developmental Editor, author team, and Project Manager meet to discuss the developmental edit notes and make a plan for revision using the “Chapter Draft Revision Actions” tab of the Deliverables spreadsheet. If you have ‌questions, bring them to this meeting.
4. Each author revises their chapter and resolves comments to prepare for the full manuscript submission. This work involves going through the identified priorities from most urgent to least urgent, and resolving comments as you go.
5. Make additional changes to your chapter so that it’s ready for students to use it in course pilots and external reviewers to read it.

Revising Mindset

As you receive feedback on your first chapter, it’s time to activate a revising mindset. This is a key moment to intervene in the biased and exclusionary history of textbook writing. You have an opportunity to challenge assumptions and offer a different pathway to student understanding.

Here are five suggestions for getting into a revising mindset, which will also apply to the writing you do on your next chapters:

1. Cultivate creative distance: The most valuable tool for a revising author is to take a step back from the text, either literally or figuratively. Sometimes, when you’re stuck, a walk around the block is all it takes to get some distance between you and what you’ve written. The more you can let go of all the work you’ve done so far, the more you’ll be able to see what is actually on the page, what’s missing, and what needs to change.
2. Prepare for change: It’s natural to resist feedback that asks you to change something that you worked hard to create. It’s much easier to justify why the text is fine the way it is. Ready yourself to be open to the feedback you will receive so you can use your creative energy to move forward rather than rationalize the status quo.
3. Look at the big picture: Revision requires you to be familiar with the entire text, not just the part you’re responsible for writing. Review the outline and remind yourself what the other chapters are offering and how your chapter fits into the whole.
4. Read like a student: Imagine what it’s like to read your text after working the night shift or while caring for a sick family member. Imagine reading the textbook on your phone while riding the bus. What can you do for this student to make the concepts more relevant, accessible, and manageable?
5. Switch formats: Try reading your chapter in a format other than the one you used to create it. For instance, if you compose chapters on your laptop, print out the chapters and read them in hard copy. Sometimes changing the font or format is all it takes to make the text feel new again. Let the Project Manager know if you need a print copy of your chapter mailed to you.

Now that you’re in a revising mindset, the next sections walk you through the steps we recommend you take – in this order – to implement your Developmental Editor’s feedback. Use the “Chapter Draft Revision Actions” tab in the Deliverables spreadsheet to capture your priorities to revise for our project’s criteria for success: learner focus, representation of diverse voices, accessibility, and Oregon context.

Step 1: Address Global Issues

Your Developmental Editor identifies global issues in the feedback report. This will include taking care of any remaining to-dos, including writing 3 H5P questions in your chapter closer section (which we will cover in the next section of this unit).

Global issues should be discussed with your entire author team and the Project Manager. They need to be addressed consistently across all chapters.

Step 2: Address Margin Comments

In Unit 8, we introduced the rubric that the Developmental Editor used to identify priorities for revision in your chapter. Your chapter document will include comments to identify changes that require adding, cutting, or rewording/reorganizing the text. Scan the comments for editorial shorthand that signals where changes need to be made. These are specific examples of places where you can implement their recommendations to improve your chapter.

Step 3: Resolve In-line Suggestions

Unit 7 offered strategies for inclusive writing built on the principles of specificity, precision, accountability, and humanity. In textbook writing, your purpose is to introduce new concepts to a wide audience of students. As a result, language that is more concise, direct, and active is likely to result in more approachable chapters.

Your Developmental Editor will use in-line suggestions to recommend fixes for common writing quirks. These edits are aimed at stylistic consistency, coherence, or grammatical structure. You can save time by accepting all suggestions automatically rather than reviewing them one by one; and you will definitely save time if you do this step last.

How Do You Know When Your Chapter is Done?

The short answer to this question is to get every to-do checked off on the “Chapter Draft To-Dos” tab of the Deliverables spreadsheet. That’s how you’ll know that your chapter is ready for the full manuscript developmental review.

The more nuanced answer is that your chapter won’t really be “done-done” at this stage, or even at the end of Year 1 of this project. It will go through more rounds of review and revision before we share the launch version of your curriculum in Year 3.

We’ve talked about the vlogbrothers concept of “80/20”: get your work to no more than 80 percent perfect and then move on. Another useful idea to consider as your deadline approaches is the “minimum viable product”: what do you need to prioritize handing in so that students can use your book next year? Start there!

Get to 80 percent by checking off all the to-dos on your list you agreed to with your team. In Year 2 of this project, we support authors to go back into chapter documents and implement the last 20 percent.

These are the topics that we will come back to during Year 2:

• Parking Lot ideas that you haven’t developed yet
• Media development requests that content creators need more time to work on
• Refining self-check question sets (also known as H5P, which is covered below)
• License and Attribution section formatting; reference list formatting.

Licenses and Attributions for Chapter Revision Logistics

Open content, original

“Chapter Revision Logistics” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Open content, shared previously

“Chapter Revision Logistics” is adapted from “Workflow for the Developmental Edit,” “OER Pathways Developmental Rubric and Editorial Shorthand,” and “OER Targeted Pathways Final MS Checklist” by Stephanie Lenox for Chemeketa Press, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

“Writing and Revising Strategies” is adapted from “The Revising Mindset” and “The Work: Revising for Inclusion” by Stephanie Lenox and Abbey Gaterud for Open Oregon Educational Resources and is licensed CC BY 4.0.