I can only speak from my limited experience as a beta, but here's how I approach it: I try not to touch the author's prose other than to correct any grammatical, spelling, or stylistic issues I find. Anything else gets a comment instead. (I can't believe I'm about to praise a Microsoft product, but Word's comment feature really is valuable here.)
I will go beyond this and actually change words or rework sentences if it's something the author has asked me to do. The person whose work I've edited most frequently comes to me specifically because he wants me to eliminate excess words and redundancies, so I have no qualms about deleting or editing text in his stories.
This author does use multiple editors to review his work before a professional editor gets his or her hands on it. (He's not a fic author.) Each editor in the chain has a different skill set -- the first couple are good at shaping raw prose early in the process, and I get the final polish. This type of process works well if you want more guidance and input from your betas and don't mind doing multiple drafts, but it's definitely not a quick process.
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Date: 2007-10-07 02:59 pm (UTC)I will go beyond this and actually change words or rework sentences if it's something the author has asked me to do. The person whose work I've edited most frequently comes to me specifically because he wants me to eliminate excess words and redundancies, so I have no qualms about deleting or editing text in his stories.
This author does use multiple editors to review his work before a professional editor gets his or her hands on it. (He's not a fic author.) Each editor in the chain has a different skill set -- the first couple are good at shaping raw prose early in the process, and I get the final polish. This type of process works well if you want more guidance and input from your betas and don't mind doing multiple drafts, but it's definitely not a quick process.