The exercise materials consist of five files:
- 1 Exercise Booklet (PDF): Gathers prereading (publisher’s memo, author bio, table of contents) and various working documents (review notes, diagrams, draft outlines, etc.) to which you may compare your own efforts.
- 2 Draft Manuscript (MS Word): May be marked up directly using Track Changes.
- 3 Developmental Plan (PDF): Models the writing of a plan addressed to the publisher but shareable with the author.
- 4 Edited Manuscript (PDF): Contains an edited version of the same manuscript (with queries at the back) with which you may compare your own editing choices and querying style.
- 5 Clean Manuscript (PDF): Replicates the Edited Manuscript, but with all edits accepted and queries removed for ease of final review.
Download the full exercise bundle here.
These exercises will allow you to practice on a chunk of manuscript while following the core restructuring process described in chapters 2 through 8. The manuscript is a draft essay—to appear in a fictional edited volume—that is bedeviled with organizational errors. At roughly seven thousand words, it is significantly shorter than a book yet long enough to provide a sense of the challenges long–form content can pose to a developmental editor.
There is no one way to edit the sample essay, no “right” answers to the individual exercises. These working documents and editorial solutions are provided for illustrative purposes.