The craft
Technical editing and document formatting, demystified
"Can you look this over?" hides at least four different jobs, priced differently and done in a different order. Knowing the levels of edit — and asking for the right one — is the difference between a document that gets polished and one that gets rescued.
The levels of edit
| Level | What the editor does | When you need it |
|---|---|---|
| Proofreading | Final pass on near-final pages: typos, punctuation, broken cross-references, bad line and page breaks. No rewriting. | After layout, before the document ships or prints. |
| Copyediting | Sentence-level correctness and consistency: grammar, usage, terminology, capitalization, numbers, citations — applied against a style guide. | Every document that leaves the building. This is the default meaning of "editing." |
| Substantive / line editing | Rewriting for clarity and flow: untangling sentences, cutting repetition, smoothing transitions, flagging logic gaps. Common for multi-author reports and ESL authors. | When the content is right but the reading is hard. |
| Structural / developmental editing | Reorganizing the document itself: what goes where, what's missing, what should be an appendix, whether the executive summary answers the reader's question. | Early — before the writing is "done." Cheapest bought first, most expensive bought last. |
Formatting is the separate, parallel craft: making the document's typography, numbering, tables, and figures consistent and navigable — ideally by rebuilding it on a proper style-based template rather than patching by hand.
How editors price work
Professional technical editors typically charge by the hour, and throughput depends on the level of edit: a copyedit of reasonably clean technical prose commonly runs a handful of pages per hour, while heavy line editing or ESL rewriting can run much slower. That is why an experienced editor will ask to see the document before quoting — the honest unit of estimation is the sample page, not the page count. Flat per-project rates are common for repeat work like newsletters and standing reports, where the effort is predictable.
Two practical implications when you're buying:
- Send instructions with the document — the deadline, the style guide (or "match this earlier report"), what must not be touched, and the RFP or client instructions if compliance matters.
- Ask for tracked changes. In Word, an edit delivered with track changes and queries in comments is auditable; a silently "fixed" file is not. You should be able to see and veto every change.
What good editors ask you
- Who is the reader, and what decision do they make with this document?
- Which style guide governs — company guide, client guide, or a standard one (Chicago, APA, GPO, your agency's)?
- What level of edit do you actually want — and is the schedule consistent with it?
- Is the formatting in scope, and is there a real template to format onto?
- Are there compliance constraints (page limits, font floors, required sections) that override style?
If you're hiring and the editor asks none of these, keep looking.
Editing AI-drafted text
A growing share of business documents now start life as machine-generated drafts. They arrive grammatical but generic: confident filler, invented specifics, and a voice that belongs to nobody. Editing them is closer to substantive editing than proofreading — verify every fact and citation, cut the throat-clearing, and rewrite until the document sounds like the organization that signs it. The levels-of-edit discipline above applies unchanged; only the failure modes are new.