Substantive editing is one of the three main editing tasks (the others are copyediting and proofreading). It usually has the following components:
- review of a document’s structure, particularly with regard to the its objectives and readers’ needs
- language and style editing
- legal aspects, including compliance with copyright law.
Some aspects, particularly of language and style editing, overlap with copyediting. It is difficult to establish a hard-and-fast division between the two, but copyediting is focussed more on the word and sentence level, while substantive editing takes an approach that is higher-level and, in sense, more fundamental.
In many cases, a substantive editor may recommend that a document, or part of it, needs major rewriting. Whether such rewriting is part of the editor’s remit depends on the agreement between author, publisher and editor.
‘Structural editing’ is an alternative term for substantive editing. The latter term is more accurate, as substantive editing does not only address structure.