How Do You Assess A Manuscript

Gary Smailes
Gary Smailes | 3 February 2026
How Do You Assess a Manuscript

What "Assessing a Manuscript" Actually Means

When writers ask, "Will you assess my manuscript?" what they often mean is, "Tell me if it's good."

Fair question. Also the wrong one.

"Good" is a foggy word. Good for who. Good compared to what. Good in what mood, on what day, in what genre. If you hand the same manuscript to five smart readers, you'll get five different gut reactions. One will love the voice. One will hate the ending. One will complain there's too much interiority. One will say there isn't enough. Welcome to publishing.

Assessing a manuscript is more useful, and more practical. It means figuring out what the manuscript is ready for next, and what stands in the way.

Readiness, not approval

A solid manuscript assessment answers questions like these:

Notice what's missing. Gold stars. Validation. A verdict from the Book Gods.

Readiness is about sequence. Publishing is full of writers line-editing paragraphs in a chapter that needs to be deleted. Or paying for a proofread on a draft where the point of view wobbles and the timeline breaks. Assessment keeps you from putting good money and good energy in the wrong place.

Here's a quick test I use with clients. Finish this sentence:

"I want to assess this manuscript because I need to know if it's ready for ____."

If you can't fill in the blank, you're not assessing. You're hoping.

Hope is fine. It's how you keep writing. Assessment is how you stop spinning.

Taste vs craft, the split you need to survive

You need two sets of eyes when you assess a manuscript.

One set is personal taste. The other is craft.

Taste says: "I don't like first-person present." Craft says: "This narrator is inconsistent, the tense drifts, and the voice goes flat in emotional scenes."

Taste says: "I'm bored." Craft says: "The scene goal is unclear, the conflict arrives late, and the outcome doesn't change anything."

Taste is not worthless. Reader experience matters. If someone is bored, you should care. Still, taste alone gives you sloppy notes. Craft turns those notes into something you can fix.

Try this small exercise. Pull three comments you've heard before, from yourself or others:

Now force each one into two lines:

  1. Taste reaction: "I felt X at Y point."
  2. Craft suspicion: "I think it's because Z."

Example:

  1. "I felt restless around chapter 10."
  2. "I think it's because scenes stop ending with a decision or consequence, so the story stops moving."

Now you have a handle. Not a complaint, a hypothesis. Hypotheses are gold because you can test them on the page.

One more thing. You are allowed to keep your taste. If you're writing cozy fantasy, you do not need a friend who only reads grimdark to become your North Star. Choose feedback from people who understand what you're trying to do.

Still, even mismatched readers will point to real problems by accident. They'll say "too slow" when the issue is "no tension." They'll say "confusing" when the issue is "unclear motivation." Your job during assessment is to translate.

Define the purpose before you start circling things

A manuscript assessment without a purpose turns into a rambling list of "stuff." Too many notes. No priorities. No plan.

Pick one purpose. Name it. Put it at the top of your notebook or document like a label on a folder. Here are the common ones, and what each one asks you to look for.

Purpose: build a self-editing plan

If you're assessing your own draft, you're looking for the biggest levers. The moves that change everything.

You want to identify:

Your output is not a pile of margin notes. Your output is a short list of tasks in order.

If you finish an assessment and your "plan" is "tighten prose," you did not assess. You sighed.

Purpose: write a beta-reader brief

Beta readers are not editors. If you hand them a 400-page manuscript and say, "Thoughts?" you'll get, "I liked it!" or "It was slow." Which is sweet. Which is useless.

Assessment helps you ask better questions. You're deciding what feedback you need.

Example beta-reader prompts:

You're not outsourcing your judgment. You're setting your readers up to report their experience in a way you can use.

Purpose: prep an editor handoff

When you hire an editor, you'll save time and money if you assess first. Editors do not want you to be perfect. They want you to be prepared.

A good handoff includes:

Assessment here is partly about honesty. If you know your draft is on version one and the ending is a placeholder, say so. You're not confessing sins. You're preventing the editor from spending hours polishing pages you intend to rewrite.

Purpose: agent submission prep

This is the sharpest purpose, because the bar is different.

Agents are not reading with patience. They're reading with time pressure. Your assessment needs to reflect that reality.

You're asking:

And you're also looking for deal-breakers: the sagging first fifty pages, the shifting point of view, the premise that doesn't match the execution. A manuscript can be "good" and still be a hard sell if it confuses its own pitch.

When the purpose

First-Pass Read: Diagnose the Big Picture (Developmental Editing Lens)

Your first pass is not a copyedit. Put the red pen down. Step away from the comma splices.

This read is about one thing: impact.

You're trying to catch the manuscript the way a real reader catches it. Tired after work. Curious. Ruthless with attention. If the story grabs, they stay. If it stalls, they wander. Your job on this pass is to notice where the book earns focus and where it spends it.

So read quickly. Faster than feels responsible. You're not studying. You're watching the book move.

Keep a piece of paper next to you. Or a notes file. Every time you feel something, jot a short, blunt note. Not a paragraph. A phrase.

Those are gold because they are honest. They show you the reader experience before your inner editor starts giving speeches.

Read for impact, not for perfection

A common mistake on the first pass is getting pulled into problem-solving. You hit a slow chapter and start rewriting sentences in your head. You find an awkward line and start polishing.

Don't.

Line work is for later. If you polish now, you risk fixing the wallpaper while the house leans.

Instead, track four big-picture reactions as you go:

Plot movement: Do events push forward, or do scenes circle?

Pacing: Do you feel pulled, or do you feel managed?

Stakes: Do consequences feel real, personal, and present on the page?

Engagement: Do you want to read the next chapter, or do you feel like you're doing homework?

If you struggle to name what's wrong, name the feeling. "Restless." "Lost." "Detached." Those are clues. Craft comes later. First you gather data.

Here's a trick I've used for years. When you stop reading, even for dinner, write one line before you walk away:

"What I think happens next is ____."

When you come back, check if the book delivered on that momentum. If you keep forgetting to write the line, or you don't care what happens next, you've learned something even more useful.

Check the foundations: genre, premise, structure

This is the part where you ask: is the book doing the job it claims to do?

Not the job you wish it would do. The job the cover copy, the opening pages, and the category promise.

Genre and audience fit

Genre is a contract. It tells the reader what kind of pleasure to expect.

On your first pass, look for two things:

  1. Signals. Does the opening announce the genre with confidence? A thriller needs threat and forward pull early. A romance needs a clear romantic throughline and emotional focus. Fantasy needs orientation without a history lecture.
  2. Payoffs. Do the scenes deliver what the reader came for? If you're writing a mystery, are there questions, clues, and turns? If you're writing a character-driven novel, are relationships and choices doing the heavy lifting?

You don't need to chase trends. You do need to respect the reader's expectations.

A quick test: if you gave the first 20 pages to a stranger who reads your genre, would they know where they are. Or would they ask, "What sort of book is this meant to be?"

If they ask, the book is whispering when it needs to speak.

Premise strength and narrative drive

Premise is more than the setup. It's the engine.

A strong premise creates ongoing pressure. It forces choices. It keeps raising the question, "What happens if this goes wrong?"

As you read, keep checking for drive:

Drive often dies in polite scenes. Two characters talk, share information, agree, and move on. Nothing changes. No cost. No decision.

You're looking for scenes that turn. A choice. A discovery. A reversal. A new problem. If you find yourself thinking, "This scene was pleasant," you should also ask, "Did it matter?"

Another test: can you name the book's central question in one sentence?

"Will she catch the killer before he strikes again?"
"Will he tell the truth before he loses his family?"
"Will they survive the winter after the supply run fails?"

If you can't name it, the reader won't feel it.

Structure and pacing

Structure is where many drafts wobble, especially in the middle. Writers get the opening right, then start explaining. Or they rush the ending because they are tired of the book, which is not the same thing as the reader being ready to leave.

On the first pass, you're not diagnosing scene by scene. You're looking for big structural patterns:

Pacing problems often look like "too much" of something.

Too much backstory in a row. Too many travel scenes. Too many conversations where people recap. Too many chapters where the protagonist reacts and agrees.

Your notes do not need to be fancy. Write: "Middle gets talky." Later you'll ask why.

The one-paragraph summary test

After you finish the first pass, write a one-paragraph summary of the story or argument.

No peeking at your outline. No flipping through chapters. Do it from memory.

Why? Because memory shows what stuck. It also shows where your story goes soft.

Here's the rule. Your paragraph must include:

If you find yourself writing mushy phrases like "a lot happens" or "they go through challenges," stop. Those are the spots where the manuscript often loses shape.

Example of a fuzzy summary sentence:

"Then she learns more about herself and things get complicated."

What does she learn. What changes. What does she do next. What does it cost.

When a writer cannot summarise the middle in plain language, the middle often needs structural work. Not prettier sentences. Clearer cause and effect.

If you're assessing nonfiction, the same test applies. Summarise the argument. Name the promise to the reader. List the main steps of the logic. If step three is "and then more stuff," you've found the section where readers start skimming.

Mark energy dips like an editor, not like a judge

While you read

Scene- and Chapter-Level Assessment: What to Cut, Fix, or Expand

Once you've done the big-picture read, you stop asking, "Do I like this?" and start asking, "What is this doing?"

Scenes and chapters are not decorations. They are units of change. If nothing changes, the reader feels it, even if the prose sings.

So your job here is blunt. You're sorting pages into three piles.

You don't need to be dramatic about it. Cutting a scene is not a moral judgement. It is plumbing.

Test each scene for function

Take one scene. Any scene. Cover the paragraphs with your hand if you need to. Then answer two questions.

1) What changes because of this scene?
If your answer is "We learn more about the world" or "We spend time with the characters," go tighter. What changes in the situation.

Look for one of these:

If you cannot name a change, the scene is running on vibes. Vibes do not turn pages.

2) Does the scene earn its place?
Earning means it does work no other scene is doing, or it does essential work better than any other option.

A lot of scenes show up because the writer wants to explain something. Backstory. Politics. The magic system. The childhood wound. All important, but explanation is not a scene. Explanation is material you weave into a scene with a goal, conflict, and consequence.

Here's a quick diagnostic. If you removed the scene, what breaks later.

A note from the trenches: writers often protect their weakest scenes because they contain "important information." Readers do not care about information. Readers care about meaning in motion.

The three-line scene check (fast and unforgiving)

For each scene or chapter, write three lines:

  1. Goal: What does the viewpoint character want, right now, on the page?
  2. Conflict: Who or what resists, right now?
  3. Outcome: How does it end differently than it began?

If you cannot answer line one, your protagonist is floating. If you cannot answer line two, you have a meeting, not a scene. If you cannot answer line three, you have stasis, and stasis reads like padding.

Try it on a sample scene:

Clean. Specific. You already feel the story moving.

Now try it on a common problem scene:

That's not a scene. That's the author thinking out loud on the page.

Build a revision map you can use

When writers tell me they are "revising the middle," I ask to see their scene list. Half the time, there isn't one. They are revising by rereading and tinkering. That's a slow way to stay stuck.

Make a simple revision map. Use a spreadsheet if you like order, or a notebook if you like mess. Either way, track these columns:

Word count matters because bloat hides in plain sight. If you have three 4,000-word scenes in a row where the outcome is "they agree to keep investigating," you have found the swamp.

Once you have the list, patterns show up fast:

This map becomes your control panel. You stop guessing and start targeting.

Spot repetition, missing links, and broken cause and effect

Most manuscripts do not fail because of one bad scene. They fail because scenes don't connect with enough force.

You're looking for three structural problems.

Repeated beats
A "beat" is an action pattern. Example: protagonist investigates, gets a hint, vows to continue. Fine once. Thin five times.

If your map shows repeated beats, choose the strongest version and cut or merge the others. Then ask what new twist must replace the cut material.

A useful question: "If the reader has seen this type of scene before, what new thing do they get here?"

Missing links
This is where the story jumps. A character decides something with no setup. A relationship changes off-page. A plan appears from nowhere.

Missing links often come from the writer knowing the story too well. You skipped the step because you already believed it.

Fixes are usually small. One scene. One sharper moment inside an existing scene. A clear decision point. A consequence shown, not reported.

Broken cause and effect
Cause and effect is the reader's trust. When events happen because the author needs them to happen, the trust leaks out.

You want a chain like this:

Not this:

When you see a consequence fail to land, circle it. That is where tension dies.

Common structural red flags (and what to do with them)

You'll see these problems a lot. The fix is rarely "add more." The fix is usually "make choices sharper and consequences stick."

Passive protagonists

Line-Level Assessment: Voice, Clarity, and Sentence Craft (Line Editing Lens)

Line-level assessment is where you stop arguing with your plot and start listening to your sentences.

This part has one goal: make the reading experience smooth. Not fancy. Not "writerly." Smooth. The reader should glide through your pages without tripping over wording, wandering pronouns, or a paragraph the size of a duvet.

A line edit does not fix a broken story. It makes a working story easier to read, harder to misunderstand, and more likely to land the way you meant it to.

Readability and flow: where readers stumble

When I'm assessing pages at line level, I look for the spots where the reader's eye slows down for the wrong reason. Not a moment of tension or a line with weight. The bad kind of slow, where you have to reread because the sentence didn't do its job.

Here are the usual suspects.

Overlong paragraphs

Long paragraphs are not a sin. A long paragraph with one idea and clean movement is fine. The problem is the paragraph where you stack five different actions, three emotions, two bits of backstory, and a weather report, then wonder why the reader feels tired.

A quick test: read the paragraph and stop every time the focus shifts. Each shift wants its own space.

Look at this (deliberately messy) example:

Jenna walked into the kitchen and the smell of coffee reminded her of her father and how he used to drink it black even though the doctor told him not to and she thought about the last time she saw him which was at the hospital and then her phone buzzed and she checked the message and it was from Mark asking if she was coming and she didn't answer because she didn't know what to say.

That paragraph holds at least four moments. Walking in. Memory. Message. Decision to avoid. Break it so the reader can track the scene.

Jenna walked into the kitchen. Coffee. Bitter and black.

Her father drank it that way, right up until the hospital.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. Mark: Are you coming?

She stared at the screen and set the phone down.

Same material. Less sludge. More control.

If you find many paragraphs running long, check for a pattern. Often the issue is fear of the white space. White space is not wasted space. White space is where pace lives.

Repetitive sentence structures

You know the rhythm when you see it. Every sentence starts with the character's name. Or every line begins with "She" or "He." Or you've built a neat little conveyor belt of "Subject verb object" sentences for a full page.

It reads like a report.

Try this quick audit. Take a page and underline the first two words of each sentence. If you see the same start over and over, the prose needs variety.

You fix this in three ways:

Example:

He opened the door. He looked down the hall. He saw the light under her door. He walked toward it.

Try:

He opened the door and paused. Light leaked from under her door. He moved toward it.

Less marching. More movement.

Unclear pronoun references

Pronouns are tiny, and they cause big confusion. If you have two women in a scene and you write, "She turned to her and told her she needed to leave," the reader has to stop and play detective. The story pauses while they assign names.

Your fix is simple and unglamorous. Use the names when the reader needs them. Use pronouns when the reference is clear.

Bad:

Maria told June she was late.

Who was late. Maria or June. No one knows.

Better:

Maria glanced at the clock. "You're late," she told June.

You might feel you're repeating names. The reader feels you're being clear. Choose the reader.

Filter words and distance: "she saw," "he felt," and other fog machines

Filter words show the reader the character watching the story, instead of living it. You've seen them:

These verbs are not wrong. They are often unnecessary. They add a layer between the reader and the moment.

Compare:

She saw the dog run into the street.

Versus:

The dog ran into the street.

The second version places the reader in the scene. The first version places the reader in the character's head, watching the dog. If you do it once, fine. If you do it every paragraph, the prose starts to feel distant.

A good exercise: pick a page and highlight every "saw," "felt," "noticed," "realized," "wondered," "thought." Then rewrite half of them by stating the thing directly.

You'll keep some. You should. Filter words are useful when perception matters.

The key is choice. Distance should be a tool, not a habit.

Voice consistency: the story has one mouth

Voice is what the reader hears when no one is speaking. It's your default sentence length, your word choices, your level of formality, your attitude toward the material.

When voice slips, readers feel it as instability. Like the book changed narrators mid-scene.

Two common problems show up here.

Tone doesn't match genre and POV

A thriller with leisurely, lyrical paragraphs about wallpaper is asking for trouble. A literary novel with punchy, punchline-heavy narration might come off glib. A close third-person POV for a sixteen-year-old with a voice that sounds like a forty-year-old professor is a mismatch.

You don't fix this by copying a style. You fix it by making decisions and sticking to them.

Ask yourself:

Then check a few chapters. If the narration moves in and out of closeness without a reason, smooth the distance. If one chapter reads like satire and the next reads like solemn drama, pick a lane.

Dialogue has "same-voice syndrome"

In a lot of

Technical and Publishing Readiness Checks (Copyediting + Proofing Mindset)

This is the part of assessing a manuscript where you put on the boring hat. The good one. The one with pockets.

Technical readiness is not about beauty. It's about trust. Readers trust you when names stay spelled the same way, time moves in one direction, dialogue punctuation behaves, and the book looks like a book instead of a document you emailed to yourself at 2 a.m.

If you skip this stage, you end up with the sort of problems reviewers love to quote. Not because they're cruel, but because the mistakes are easy to spot and hard to ignore.

Consistency audit: the stuff readers remember when you slip

Consistency errors rarely come from ignorance. They come from revision. You changed a detail in chapter 14 and forgot it was planted in chapter 3. You renamed a character, then missed five instances. You moved the story from autumn to summer, then left a stray "cold November rain" behind like a dead giveaway.

When you assess consistency, you're looking for repeatable facts and repeatable choices.

Names, timelines, ages, locations, terminology

Start with the obvious.

A fast way to do this without reading the whole book with a microscope is to build a "fact list" as you go. Nothing fancy. A running document with headings.

Example:

Character facts

Timeline

Locations

Now you have something to check against. When chapter 19 says Marisol is 34 or the funeral slides to Wednesday, you catch it before a reader does.

Two small warnings from the trenches:

  1. Numbers drift. Ages, dates, distances, money, time of day. You write "ten minutes" in one draft, "half an hour" in the next. Both feel fine while drafting. Together they create a world where clocks lie.
  2. Injuries heal at the speed of plot. If someone breaks ribs in chapter 6 and is wrestling a villain in chapter 8, you need either a time jump or a different injury. Readers keep score on pain.

Formatting choices

Formatting is consistency too. If you italicize internal thoughts in chapter 2, keep doing it. If you use spaced asterisks for scene breaks, do it every time. If you write text messages as block quotes, commit.

Mixed formatting makes a manuscript look unprofessional even when the writing is strong. It signals "draft" to everyone who touches the pages, including agents, editors, and reviewers.

Style decisions and the style sheet

A style sheet sounds like something only copyeditors enjoy, but writers benefit from it as soon as the manuscript hits 60,000 words and your memory starts bargaining with you.

Your style sheet is a one-stop record of choices so you stop re-deciding the same things.

What goes on it?

If you're traditionally publishing, a house style will take over later. Your job now is to be consistent within your own manuscript. Consistency gives editors fewer reasons to stop and fewer things to query.

Mechanics triage: find patterns, not every typo

Copyediting and proofreading are different jobs, but during assessment you're not performing either in full. You're diagnosing whether the manuscript is clean enough to move forward and what kinds of mechanical issues repeat.

Think "triage." You're looking for patterns that will slow the next stage of editing or make the manuscript look unready.

Repeated grammar issues

A few common ones show up across drafts.

You don't need to correct every instance during assessment. You need to know what you're dealing with. If you spot the same error ten times in twenty pages, you've found a priority.

Overuse of adverbs and filler words

Writers reach for adverbs when the verb is doing push-ups in wet sand.

Adverbs are not illegal. The issue is overuse, especially in dialogue tags and action beats. If every line is "said quietly," "asked nervously," "laughed awkwardly," you're not giving the reader clear staging or clear emotion. You're narrating your own uncertainty.

Filler words work the same way. They pad sentences without adding meaning. During assessment, you're not hunting every "some" and "a bit." You're checking whether your default style leans on softeners.

If you want a quick check, use your word processor's search for a few usual suspects and look at the context:

Turning Your Assessment into a Revision Plan (Prioritise Like an Editor)

You've assessed your manuscript. Great. Now you're holding a messy pile of notes, highlights, sticky flags, and late-night remarks like "WHY" and "huh???" in the margins.

The assessment step spots problems. The revision plan fixes them in the right order.

If you skip the plan, you fall into the most common trap I see in writers at every level. You start polishing sentences because polishing feels like progress. Meanwhile the story is missing a load-bearing wall.

A revision plan keeps you from repainting a room you're about to demolish.

Rank issues by impact, not by annoyance

Your notes will include two types of problems:

  1. Big problems that affect the whole manuscript.
  2. Small problems that bother you every time you see them.

Your brain will beg you to fix the small problems first. They're quick. They give you a hit of accomplishment. They also waste time if you later cut the scene, change the POV, or rewrite the chapter from scratch.

So you rank by impact.

Start with structure

Structural issues change everything downstream. Fix these first:

A simple test: if you fix the problem, will you need to rewrite lots of pages? If yes, move it to the top of the list.

If the protagonist has no clear goal until page 80, no line edit in the world will save the opening. If your argument wanders for three chapters before landing on the point, a cleaner sentence won't fix the confusion.

Then move to scene-level work

Once the big frame holds, you work scene by scene.

This is where you cut, combine, reorder, expand, and tighten. It's also where you stop thinking in terms of chapters as sacred objects. Chapters are containers. Scenes are the engine.

If your assessment notes include things like:

Those are scene-level issues. They matter more than word choice because they affect momentum and reader patience.

Save line editing and copyediting for later

Line editing makes language sharper. Copyediting makes language correct and consistent. Both are valuable, but they sit at the end of the pipeline for a reason.

If you line edit a scene you later delete, you've spent an hour making the trash smell nicer.

So yes, keep a running list of line-level fixes you want to remember. Park them. Do them after the story is stable.

Turn vague notes into tasks you can finish

Most revision notes start out as judgments.

Judgments are not tasks. You can't open your manuscript on a Saturday and "fix pacing" in any meaningful way. You need actions. Concrete changes. Things you can check off.

Here's how you translate.

Example: "Fix pacing"

First, locate the drag. Be specific. Which chapters. Which scenes. Where do you feel the slowdown?

Then name the cause. Common causes include:

Now convert it into tasks.

Instead of: "Fix pacing in the middle."

Write:

Notice how each task tells you what to do, where to do it, and how you'll know it's done.

A quick mini-exercise: open the chapter where your energy dips. Highlight every paragraph that explains instead of shows. Then pick two spots where a character could make a choice with consequences. Those are your first pacing levers.

Example: "Character feels flat"

This note often means one of three things.

  1. The character wants something, but we don't feel it.
  2. The character wants something, but never has to choose.
  3. The character reacts, but rarely drives events.

So you create tasks aimed at agency and consequence.

Instead of: "Make Mara more interesting."

Write:

Flat characters often become sharp the moment they have to risk something. Not in a speech. In a choice.

A useful format: task cards

If you like simple systems, use "task cards." One problem per card or per bullet, written like this:

You're building a set of small projects. That's what revision is.

Build a workflow you can repeat without burning out

A solid workflow does two things. It keeps you focused, and it stops you from revising the same chapter twelve times out of nervousness.

The cleanest approach is one goal per pass.

Pass 1: Structure

You work on:

This pass often looks ugly. Good. You're moving walls.

Tip: keep a "salvage file" for cut material. When you

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "assessing a manuscript" actually mean?

Assessing a manuscript is not about saying whether the book is "good." It is a diagnostic process that identifies what the draft is ready for next and what stands in the way — for example, whether it needs structural work, a beta-reader pass, or is close enough for copyediting. Think of it as a readiness check that tells you the next practical step.

When should I get a manuscript assessment?

Get an assessment when you want a clear answer to "Is this ready for X?" — X being developmental editing, beta readers, agent submission or self-publishing investment. If you cannot fill the sentence "ready for ____" with a concrete next step, an assessment will stop you from wasting time and money on the wrong stage.

How do I define the purpose before starting an assessment?

Name one purpose and stick to it: build a self-editing plan, write a beta-reader brief, prep an editor handoff, or check agent submission readiness. Each purpose changes what you look for, so include that goal at the top of your notes and use a manuscript assessment checklist tailored to that outcome.

What should I look for on a first-pass read?

On a first-pass read, focus on impact rather than line-level fixes: plot movement, pacing, stakes and reader engagement. Read quickly and jot blunt, single-line reactions (for example "restless" or "great scene turn") to capture the reader experience before you start solving problems.

How do I test whether a scene should be cut, fixed or expanded?

Use the three-line scene check: list the scene Goal, Conflict and Outcome. If you cannot name a clear change or the scene does not earn its place, put it in the "cut or merge" pile. If it has purpose but weak execution, mark it "fix"; if it lacks necessary setup or payoff, mark it "expand."

How do I turn an assessment into a usable revision plan?

Rank issues by impact, not by annoyance. Start with structural fixes (plot logic, goals, stakes), then scene-level work, and save line editing for last. Convert vague notes like "pacing is off" into concrete tasks (for example "Chapters 5–7: remove repeated setup; add turning point in chapter 6").

What technical checks should I include for publishing readiness?

Include a consistency audit (names, timeline, locations), a style sheet for repeatable choices, and a mechanics triage to spot repeated grammar or punctuation patterns. These checks form the publishing-readiness checklist that prevents simple errors from undermining an otherwise strong manuscript.

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