The Three Tiers of Editing
Content, structure, copy — three different jobs that need three different passes
This is article 3A of The Writers’ Table.
Most writers edit everything at once — grammar in one sentence, structure in the next, purpose halfway through the page. The result is edits that contradict each other: a sentence you’ve tightened for clarity in one pass and then added caveats to in the next.
The editing problem isn’t a lack of skill but a lack of separation. Content, structural, and copy editing are three different jobs that require three different modes of attention. Trying to do them simultaneously means doing all three poorly. (Publishing carves these up differently — there, “developmental editing” covers my first two tiers, and “line editing” sits between structure and copy. The split below is cut for documentation work, where organization is a big enough job to get its own pass.)
Tier 1: Content Editing
Content editing asks whether the document does the right job. Not whether it does the job well — whether it does the right job.
The questions at this tier: Does this document address a real user need? Is the scope correct — not too narrow, not too broad? Does it start where the user’s problem starts? Does it stop before it wanders into adjacent territory that belongs in a different document?
At the content tier, you’re not reading sentences. You’re reading the argument. Take a document you’ve written and try to summarize it in a single sentence: “This document explains what to whom so they can accomplish what.” If you can’t write that sentence clearly, the document has a content problem — a confusion at its core about what it’s supposed to accomplish.
A good content edit often produces structural changes: sections that belong in a different document, missing context that needs to be added, an entry point that’s set at the wrong level of expertise. Fix these problems before moving to structure. There’s no point in optimizing the arrangement of sections that shouldn’t exist.
Tier 2: Structural Editing
Structural editing asks whether the document is well organized. The right content is there; is it in the right order?
Technical documents fail structurally in a few predictable ways. They bury the most important information in the middle — the procedure in the third paragraph, the prerequisite in the sixth. They jumble task content with concept content in ways that make both harder to use. They repeat information in multiple places, creating a maintenance problem and a credibility problem. Readers notice when sections say slightly different things about the same topic.
At the structural tier, read your document as a list of moves. What does each section do? Does the sequence make sense from the reader’s perspective? Does each section set up the next, or could the sections be shuffled without losing anything? If they could be shuffled without consequence, the structure isn’t doing structural work — it’s just order.
Transitions matter here. The boundary between sections should feel like a hand-off: “Here’s what you just learned; here’s why the next section follows from it.” When a reader experiences a jump — “why are we talking about this?” — there’s a structural problem at that boundary.
The editing problem isn’t lack of skill. It’s lack of separation.
Tier 3: Copy Editing
Copy editing is the tier writers spend the most time on and the one that matters least when the first two tiers haven’t been addressed. Perfectly proofread sentences in the wrong order, covering the wrong content, are still wrong.
At the copy tier: grammar, spelling, consistency, style guide compliance, link accuracy, code accuracy. This is also where you check that terminology is used consistently — that the thing called “workspace” in section one isn’t called “project” in section three.
One practical rule: don’t copy-edit while you write. Let a draft sit, then read it specifically for mechanical issues. Rereading your own prose in the same format lets your brain fill in what it expects to see rather than what’s there. Change the format — print it, change the font, read it aloud — to break the familiarity pattern.
The Order Matters
The sequence is intentional. Fixing copy errors on a page you’re going to restructure wastes time. Restructuring sections you’re going to cut wastes time. The tiers are ordered from biggest change to smallest: concept, then structure, then sentence.
In practice, you’ll sometimes catch a structural issue while copy-editing or notice a content problem while restructuring. That’s fine — move up a tier when you find the problem, then come back down. The discipline is avoiding the reverse: don’t fix sentences when you’re supposed to be assessing whether the document is structurally sound.
Applying This With a Deadline
The three-tier model assumes you have time for three passes. Often you don’t. When a deadline forces you to compress, don’t compress by skipping tiers — compress by doing each tier fast and shallow rather than skipping the earlier ones entirely. A five-minute content check (“Does this document still do the right job?”) catches more expensive problems than an hour of careful copy editing on a document that shouldn’t exist in its current form. If you only have time for one tier, make it the first one.
Further Reading
The whole framework
Robert Van Buren and Mary Fran Buehler, The Levels of Edit (JPL, 2nd edition, 1980) — the original tiered-editing scheme for technical documents, developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This was handed to me on my first day at Ford Aerospace at NASA-Houston. Free PDF from NASA’s Technical Reports Server.
Carolyn Rude and Angela Eaton, Technical Editing (Pearson, 5th edition) — the standard textbook on technical editing, moving from basic copyediting through comprehensive (content- and structure-level) editing.
Content tier
Diátaxis — a framework for deciding what job a document should do (tutorial, how-to, reference, or explanation) and what belongs in it. The content-tier question — “is this the right document?” — is the question Diátaxis exists to answer.
Janice (Ginny) Redish, Letting Go of the Words (Morgan Kaufmann, 2nd edition) — content as conversation: what readers came to do, and what to cut because it doesn’t serve that.
Structural tier
Mark Baker, Every Page Is Page One (XML Press) — how readers actually enter and move through documentation, and how to organize topics so each one stands on its own.
Write the Docs, “Documentation Guide” at writethedocs.org/guide — an actively maintained, practitioner-written resource that covers structural and content-level review specifically for technical documentation rather than general prose.
Copy tier
Amy Einsohn and Marilyn Schwartz, The Copyeditor’s Handbook (University of California Press, 4th edition) — the standard reference for copy-tier work and the field’s default recommendation.
Google, Developer Documentation Style Guide — a free, current, doc-specific style guide; useful as a working standard for the consistency and terminology checks this tier requires.
What You Can Do
Take any document you’ve written and answer these three questions, in order:
Content: In one sentence, what does this document do for the reader?
Structural: Is the most important information in the first third of the document?
Copy: Name one consistency error you find in two minutes of scanning.
Thursday: The Passive Voice Myth — when the passive voice is the wrong choice, and when it’s the only choice. The rule you were taught is incomplete.