Editing

Editing covers everything from deciding that a report’s third chapter should become its first to noticing that a phone number is missing a digit. Editors usually describe it in levels. A structural or developmental edit looks at the whole: what the piece is arguing, what it leaves out and whether its shape suits the reader. A line edit works on sentences, rhythm and voice. Copy editing brings consistency and correctness, and proofreading is the final check before publication. Organisations rarely run all four as separate stages, but knowing which one a draft needs prevents a lot of wasted effort.

The editor may be a content editor, a copy editor, a colleague or the writer returning to their own draft after a break. What makes it editing rather than more writing is the change of position: reading as the intended reader would and asking what the piece needs to work for them. Robert Gottlieb, who edited Joseph Heller, said the editor’s relationship to a book should be invisible. Readers should notice only that the argument has become clearer.

Why it matters for content

Most of what an organisation publishes starts with someone who knows the subject far better than the reader does. That knowledge is the reason the content exists, and also why first drafts so often assume context, bury the main point or answer a question nobody asked. Editing is usually the first moment anyone stands in for the reader before publication. Without it, the organisation’s internal logic – its structure, terminology and priorities – tends to go straight onto the page.

Editing for the web also differs from editing for print in two important respects: the piece never stands alone and it’s rarely finished. A page sits among hundreds of others, so an editor has to ask whether it duplicates, contradicts or undermines something elsewhere on the site. GOV.UK’s editorial review, known as 2i or “second pair of eyes”, made this explicit: reviewers read the whole page even when a single line had changed, because one small update can cause problems elsewhere. Much organisational editing happens long after launch, when policies change, prices rise or a service moves. An editing process designed only for new content leaves the larger part of the estate without one.

How AI changes the picture

Editing has always assumed a writer with something to say. The editor’s job is to understand that intention and help the text serve it, querying where meaning is uncertain rather than inventing it. Generated drafts weaken that assumption. They often arrive fluent, well organised and free of errors, so the familiar signals that a draft needs work are missing, while the questions underneath, about whether it’s accurate and whether anyone stands behind it, are harder to answer. The editor Mary Kole describes being hired to edit two AI-assisted novels and finding herself making hundreds of decisions that belonged to the author. Organisations meet the same problem in less literary forms: a briefing note or web page that reads smoothly but has no identifiable source for its claims and no view of what matters most.

Two practical consequences follow. Editing an AI-assisted draft often means returning to the brief and the evidence before touching any sentences, and sometimes concluding that rewriting from good notes would be quicker. Scope and disclosure matter more too, since an editor can’t judge how much work a draft needs without knowing how it was made.

AI is also a capable assistant to editing. It can suggest a structure, say what a draft appears to argue or play an impatient reader asking what a paragraph means. That gives writers some of the distance editing provides at the moment they need it, before a draft reaches anyone else. Its suggestions tend towards the most common way of saying things, so it’s better at removing obstacles than at deciding what a piece should do. Judgement about purpose, emphasis and what to leave out stays with people, and editing is where much of that judgement gets exercised.