The Final Polish: Preparing Your Draft for an Editor’s Eye
By the time you reach this stage, you’ve already done the hard work. You’ve shaped the structure, cut the excess, checked for consistency, and listened to the rhythm of your sentences. What remains is presentation. The polish pass is what makes your manuscript ready to be read by someone else — not perfect, not finished, but clear enough for an editor to step inside the world you’ve created.
An editor doesn’t expect you to catch everything. That’s their role. But they do expect a manuscript that shows care and let’s be honest it, you only want to pay for the things you struggle with, not the things you could do yourself.
If your file is littered with typos, half-deleted notes, or tangled formatting, the story risks being obscured. Your editor will spend a lot of time cleaning up and your manuscript will likely need another pass before moving to the next stage. Polishing is how you clear the surface so the work beneath can shine.
Rest First, Then Return
One of the best tools in polishing isn’t software — it’s distance. When you’ve just finished a round of revisions, your brain fills in gaps and skips over flaws. Give the manuscript space. A week is good, a month is better. When you return, the missing “the,” the unclosed quotation mark, and the uneven pacing of your paragraphs stand out like loose threads.
Reading aloud helps too. Sentences that seemed fine silently may suddenly trip your tongue. What catches in your voice often points to what will catch for a reader.
Proof at the Surface Level
Polish isn’t about rewriting for style — it’s about checking the basics. A proofing pass is slow, deliberate work: word by word, line by line.
You’re looking for what a reader notices immediately when it’s wrong:
A homophone slipped in (“there” instead of “their”).
A missing word in a key sentence.
Punctuation that opens but never closes.
Verbs that wobble between past and present tense.
Automated tools can help with obvious slips, but they miss nuance. A spellchecker won’t flag a character whose name changes spelling, or a timeline that accidentally doubles back. Only human attention — yours — can do that.
Resolve the Small Inconsistencies
If a character’s hair is brown in chapter two and auburn in chapter eight, or if a made-up word is capitalized one time and lowercase the next, readers begin to doubt the solidity of the world.
A simple style sheet is your safeguard. Keep a running list of names, dates, places, invented words, and preferred spellings. Before you call the draft finished, go back through and check your manuscript against it. It takes time, but it spares your editor from flagging issues you could have resolved — and frees them to focus on the deeper work.
Format Like a Professional
Editors don’t care about flourishes. They care about readability. Standard formatting isn’t about stripping personality; it’s about reducing friction so the words themselves take center stage.
That means: a standard font like Times New Roman or Cambria, twelve-point size. Double spacing. One-inch margins. Paragraphs indented instead of separated by extra breaks. Page numbers in the footer. Your name and title in the header.
When a manuscript arrives clean, the editor can dive in without distraction. When it doesn’t, their first impression is that they’ll need to spend energy fixing basics before they can get to the heart of the work.
Clear Away the Debris
Drafts carry the residue of process. Tracked changes. Margin notes. Highlighted phrases meant to remind you “check this later.” Experimental lines you never cut. These may have been useful along the way, but they don’t belong in a file you send to an editor.
Go through and sweep them out. Accept or reject tracked changes. Delete every note to yourself. Remove colour highlighting. Standardize italics and bold. Imagine your editor opening the file for the first time: what do you want them to see — the scaffolding, or the story?
Prepare the Surrounding Pages
A manuscript is more than its chapters. During proofreading, the front and back matter matter. During final stages of copyediting a table of contents in nonfiction or collected works helps an editor navigate quickly and they will check it for you. If you have acknowledgments, dedications, or an author’s note drafted, include them.
Export a Truly Clean File
When you’ve done all the above, don’t simply save over your working file. Export a new, fresh version of the manuscript specifically for submission. That way you protect your draft in progress and keep a record of exactly what you sent.
Send the file in Word (.docx) unless your editor has requested otherwise. This is the standard format for track changes and comments. For your own records, also save a PDF to preserve formatting.
Name the file clearly. LastName_Title_Date.docx works. A small detail, but it signals professionalism.
The Mindset Shift
Polishing can feel tedious, but it’s also the stage where you declare: I’ve done my part. This is ready to share. That doesn’t mean it’s flawless. It means it’s stable enough for an editor to do their best work.
Think of it as clearing a path. You’ve built the story. Now you’re sweeping aside the leaves so someone else can walk into it without tripping.
Conclusion
The polish pass is about care. It shows you take your own work seriously enough to present it clearly, and that you value the editor’s time and attention. Every typo you catch, every margin you adjust, every tracked change you clear away frees your editor to focus on what truly matters: the story you’ve written.
Please note:
Editors will usually work through the muck if they believe it is ready to be edited, but you are fine tuning and fast tracking the process by doing these preliminaries.
