Kibin Editing Distinctions: Final Cut, Stylistic, and Clarity
After payment, the author is presented with a page to provide more details about their document. The first field asks about the state of their draft:
Their selection here categorizes the document into one of three types -- Final Cut, Stylistic, and Clarity, respectively.
You will see either the final cut clapperboard, the stylistic artist's palette, or the clarity magnifying glass under “Types” on your dashboard. The copy that the author selected is shown in italics next to each edit type when you hover over the icon on your dashboard.
Final cut documents are either nearly ready for submission or will be returned to the author without much time for them to revise. Aim to help the author reach a final, polished draft without substantial revision needed on their part. These writers need your help to hunt down punctuation problems, fix typos, and smooth out awkward transitions and phrasing. They are not looking for commentary on making large reorganization efforts, suggestions to add to their content, or editing changes that will otherwise result in a lot of unexpected work they may not have time to complete. (Commentary about significant oversights, clarity issues, etc. is still of course encouraged, whether in the document itself or in your closing feedback.)
Stylistic -- My draft is a work in progress. I am open to all comments and suggestions from my editor to improve it.
Stylistic documents are rough drafts of all types. In these documents, writers are often struggling to add style and flow to their overall message. In addition to error correction, your goal is to help the author improve the flow of language and ideas while also guiding them to a more polished draft. Your edits might work to improve word choice and phrasing, while your commentary might pinpoint logic issues, argument or idea structure problems, parts of the text to expand, etc.
Clarity -- My draft is rough or incomplete. I am most concerned about logic and flow; please tell me where my writing could be clearer.
Clarity documents are submitted by writers who are not sure that their purpose, ideas, and writing are clear to their audience. These early drafts might be difficult to make sense of, so you may need to make an effort to discern what the writer is trying to say through your edits and commentary. In addition to error correction and edits for flow, your goal is to show the author what won’t make sense to the reader. In other words, you need to give these documents a strong dose of clarity.
Remember: Users select the distinction in which their documents fall. This means the quality of writing and difficulty of documents can vary within a single distinction. For example, an author may think that she is submitting a Final Cut version of a document, but you may discover a lot of unclear phrasing and it turns into more of a Clarity edit.
Consider the writer’s selection above to help guide your approach and feedback. Typically, Final Cut documents will require less commentary overall. The category should not impact your focus on error correction in the text, and your ultimate goal for each document should be leaving the text better than you found it.
Kibin admins do consider the editing distinction during the quality assurance process, as it pertains to the quality expectation “the edit and feedback address the user's specific concerns or requests within the scope of Kibin's services.” Some examples of how an edit would not meet this quality guideline are
- A Clarity edit has no commentary about the clarity/logic of the author’s ideas/argument.
- A Final Cut edit contains feedback that the author should restructure the paper around a new thesis.
- A Stylistic edit receives no feedback about the content or ideas in their draft.
As long as you’re providing quality work with the aim of addressing the author’s concerns, everything will be smooth sailin'.