Writing Effective Editorial Notes

Editors and technical writers who are doing reviews often have to include comments to the authur. This blog post has some suggestions on how to write effective editorial notes. Speaking from experience on both sides of the table, this article is spot on. This point is particularly important.

Make concrete suggestions.

The author should have no question about what you want them to do. Make it as easy as possible for the author to fix the problem. (Again, see principle #1.)

If the author’s intent is clear to you, then edit the text and leave a comment explaining the change. For example, a comment like “Wordy — please revise” is absolutely unhelpful. Edit the sentence, and if there’s a chance you’ve changed the author’s meaning, then just flag the change: “Tightened the sentence up. Please confirm I have not changed your intended meaning.”

If the text is ambiguous, then explain why and provide a number of alternative sentences in the comment — for example, “Ambiguous. If you mean X, I recommend something like ‘A,’ but if you mean Y, then I recommend ‘B.’ ”