Three stages of manuscript development – and why they matter to you as a mentor
- bethann29
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Or, how to put your red pen down and really help developing writers!
When folks find out that I have written a book with Stephen B. Heard called Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences: An Evidence-based Approach, they often ask: “What’s your #1 tip?” [1]
It might be cheating to say “read Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences (and also Steve’s previous book, The Scientist’s Guide to Writing).
So, here’s our top tip: When you’re commenting on a developing writer’s draft, think hard about the stage of the draft’s development. [2] (Picture a draft from a grad student’s thesis, or an undergraduate’s term paper [3], or whatever suits you.)
To make this advice more useful, let’s unpack it a bit [4], and think about your instincts when you comment on writing, and about the way writers usually produce drafts. Frequently, commenting instincts are mismatched to the work of drafting.
Most of us are pretty good at spotting problems with grammar, word choice, sentence structure, and so on. These small-scale “errors” are abundant in an early draft of anything, and it’s easy (if time-consuming) to mark them, and maybe correct them. This is a process called line editing (to emphasize attention at the word-by-word, line-by-line scale), and the result looks like this:
Line editing isn’t just an obvious intervention for most drafts—for many people (both of us very definitely included) it’s darn near irresistible. [5] But line editing isn’t actually helpful at all.
We know—those are fighting words. And we’ll admit to using a little bit of hyperbole there. More accurately, line editing is helpful only very, very late in the process of manuscript development. And that’s where being aware of “stages of manuscript development” comes in. Here are the three stages we mentioned in this post’s title:
Concept development stage – what is the manuscript about?
Presentation stage – how should the manuscript be structured?
Revision stage – how should the text be written?
Although now we have to admit to a bit of sneakiness, because we’d actually like you to consider six stages, not three, with concept development, presentation, and revision each divided into “early” and “late” substages.
What each stage should emphasize
Here’s what we think the writer should target at each stage, and—key to this post—what you as a mentor should accordingly target for feedback. You’ll notice line edits don’t show up until the very last stage!
1. Concept development stage – what is the manuscript about?
a. Early. Writer: Topic and content selection, rationale. Mentor: Thematic feedback only: missing ideas, gaps in logic, essential context. Max of 3-5 major feedback points!
b. Late. Writer: Developing understanding of topic background and context. Mentor: Same as for early concept development, but adding in check for essential citations.
2. Presentation stage – how should the manuscript be structured?
a. Early. Writer: Outlining content, point-form rationale and context. Mentor: Focus on thematic/structural feedback: content missing or out of order, gaps in logic, redundancy among sections. Max of 3-5 major feedback points!
b. Late. Writer: Refining outline; expanding points into draft text. Mentor: Same as for early presentation. Sentences are forming; but keep your hands off for now!
3. Revision stage – how should the text be written?
a. Early. Writer: Refining content, organization, structure. Mentor: Prioritize organizational/structural feedback: content out of order, redundancy among paragraphs, clear transitions between paragraphs, topics. May be more extensive comments than for earlier stages.
b. Late. Writer: Polishing text at the sentence level. Mentor: It’s finally time for feedback on syntax/style: paragraph, sentence structure; grammar and spelling; style (passive voice, jargon, etc. – but be careful!).
Thar she blows! Here, in stage 3b (and only in stage 3b) is where you can fruitfully succumb to your urge to line edit. [6] Until you get to that final stage, where a draft is very close to its finished form, you can completely ignore the finer details of how it’s written. In fact, you should. If you get this wrong – if you start with line edits on the very first draft – you’ll spend way more time working with the draft, while helping its writer less.
That last bit is important. You may feel that line editing even at an early stage is harmless – kind of a mentoring gravy that’s extra value for the writer if you have time for it. We don’t think so. The problem is twofold.
First, as the mentor: once you’ve marked a bunch of grammar and spelling issues, you’re likely to feel that you’ve put in some time and surely made things better. Not only that: you probably believe that the writer you’re mentoring shouldn’t see a manuscript that looks like an industrial spill at the red-ink factory (and we’d agree, even if we don’t always live up to our agreement). Moreover, a focus on line editing may lead you to reduce or even skip the bigger-scale comments that are what the draft really needs.
Second, considering writer behavior: if you mark a lot of stray commas and spelling mistakes in an early draft, you’ll probably get that draft back with the commas and spelling mistakes fixed – but little else. Writers are human, and they’ll pick the low-hanging fruit. Who wouldn’t rather fix some spelling errors than do the hard work of overhauling manuscript structure? And with that easy work done, it’s tempting for a writer reason that they’ve made a bunch of changes, so the draft must be much better and ready for the mentor again. Which, of course, it isn’t.
The bottom line
Making line edits (for you) and responding to them (for the writer) becomes a distraction from much more important work. For most of the process, as a manuscript develops through the stages we’ve mapped, content and organization should be the real focus for both mentor and writer. If you’re tempted by the line edit (as most of us are): first identify the stage of manuscript development you’re dealing with. If you’re not working with a draft that’s at the very end of the process, put down the red pen and trust the developing writer to revise. It’s only with great reluctance, at the last, polishing stage, that you should pick that red pen up again.
It’s hard, we know. But wouldn’t you rather give more valuable feedback, in less time?
How about you?
How often do you default to line editing and why? What kinds of writing feedback can you picture approaching differently, now that you’ve considered these developmental stages of a draft? What opportunities and challenges do these suggestions present to your workflow and goals for helping developing writers?
This post was first published on my blog at commnatural.com. © Stephen Heard and Bethann Garramon Merkle January 6, 2026, all rights reserved.
[1] We’ll use “mentor” here, but we could use “teach” and that would be right too. After all, if you’re doing teaching the way we suspect you’d like to, the line between that and mentoring is very thin. But this is a good excuse to recognize that there’s a broad range of things you might be doing with the developing writers you’re mentoring, from grading one-and-done exam answers right through to the protracted back-and-forth of fostering development, writing, and revision of an entire thesis. While today’s tip has its most obvious application closer to the thesis end of that continuum, you’ll be able to imagine lessons from it for other kinds of writing activities. And that’s generally true of what you’ll get in Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences – not because we’re brilliant but because just like skills for writing, skills for mentoring writers are highly transferable from one context to another.
[2] As you read on, one thing you’ll notice is that while we might seem to be talking about ways to improve the draft, our real goal is to improve the writer. That’s a constant theme in Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences – and stay tuned for a post paralleling this one that discusses the developmental stages of a writer instead of a draft.
[3] With the caveat that you’re going to imagine a term paper for which you see multiple drafts as the student develops it. While this isn’t the most common model, we suspect you’ll agree that it’s far superior pedagogically to one-and-done – you just probably can’t imagine how you could possibly do it. Well, read on, because the rest of this post offers a path (and look to our book for course-structure and curricular ideas that can also help).
[4] This post is based on material from Chapter 3 of our new book, Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences. If you’re intrigued, or if you’re skeptical, you can read a more detailed exposition there. You can order a copy of our book here and read more excerpts and resources here.
[5] Steve, for example, just can’t help himself. Sometimes he writes on a draft “I won’t mark further grammatical errors” and then not two minutes later finds himself marking another one. Is there a 12-step program for compulsive line editors??
[6] You can; you may not need to. Watch this space for a post coming soon on an alternative to line edits called “minimal marking” – something we’re almost sure will get hackles up!
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