Updated: 2 days ago
Developmental editors can use AI tools like Claude and Gemini Notebook to streamline first-pass analysis, generate supplementary documents, and draft author feedback without compromising editorial judgment or integrity. This article explains how, with your first steps and example prompts.
Table of Contents
What Is AI Developmental Editing?
Why Use AI for Developmental Editing?
How Can You Use AI for Developmental Editing?
Your First Step: Choose the Right AI Tool
How to Use AI for Pre-editing Support (Includes Prompts)
How to Use AI to Fact-Check and Brainstorm During Editing (Includes Prompts)
How to Use AI to Draft Feedback
What Are the Challenges of Using AI for Developmental Editing?
Developmental editing is a complex task that requires strategic thinking, creativity, and emotional intelligence, along with a deep understanding of genre conventions and the publishing industry. It’s no wonder we developmental editors tend to think highly of ourselves.
When the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) first entered our personal narratives, it made sense that many of us assumed the technology would not be capable of assisting with this demanding, cerebral higher level of editing.
As AI has become entrenched in writing and lower levels of editing, developmental editors now may be starting to ask:
Can a machine truly understand the nuances of a piece?
Will a bot render my hard-earned expertise into a bunch of algorithms?
Is there still a place for me—the human—in this new technological era?
It’s true that AI’s text extraction and analytical capabilities are well-suited to helping developmental editors with many job duties. This article lays out how to use AI for developmental editing in a way that complements your human skills and allows you to improve your efficiency without compromising your editorial judgment or integrity, which should never be replaced.
When a developmental editor uses AI to quickly identify a manuscript’s flaws, it frees up time to focus on creative solutions, resulting in higher-quality edits completed faster. Sounds too good to be true? It isn’t. Read on.
How Can AI Help Developmental Editors: Key Takeaways
Developmental editing tackles the big picture: structure, pacing, character arcs, and theme.
AI can slash your first-pass time and catch issues that might have slipped through.
AI analysis + your judgment and expertise = stronger editing completed in less time.
What Is AI Developmental Editing?
Developmental editing focuses on the “big picture” of a manuscript. That means analyzing the fundamentals:
Structure and pacing
Plot and character development
Theme and overall cohesion
Then synthesizing the analysis into suggestions that guide the writer to create a cohesive and engaging manuscript that readers will appreciate.
AI developmental editing includes all the same pieces, with one addition: AI tools to assist with analyzing, organizing, and brainstorming to reduce the manual workload.
When AI supports developmental editing, tasks are divided by capability: the AI does the tasks it can do best, and the human editor does the tasks only a human can do.
Why Use AI for Developmental Editing?
Imagine doing your job faster and easier. Then imagine doing your job faster, easier, and better. Incorporating AI into your editorial workflow opens the doors to real gains in efficiency and quality.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
Speed. AI tools can now analyze an entire book-length manuscript in one go, producing a chapter-by-chapter summary and a report of the main weaknesses you would have identified on your first pass—before you've read a single page. When you do start reading:
You will be more prepared than you’ve ever been.
You’ll have reserved all the hours you would have spent on your first read-through.
Quality. Think of AI like a colleague you can bounce ideas off of. It’s excellent at identifying content gaps, recognizing inconsistencies, and brainstorming ideas and solutions. Working with AI for developmental editing means:
Fewer subtle issues slip through the cracks.
You will have options to consider that you may not have thought of on your own.
Ready to add AI to your workflow? Here’s where to start: ...
How Can You Use AI for Developmental Editing?
There’s a place for AI at all stages of the developmental editing workflow, from pre-editing tasks to drafting feedback for authors. Here’s an overview of how to use AI in your work.
The first step is to choose the best AI tool in the toolbox. Good news! This decision got a lot easier.
A year or two into our AI era, only a handful of specialized tools could handle a full-length manuscript without you breaking it into chunks first. That's changed. Today, all the major AI chatbots—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot—can take in an entire book-length document at once.
So the question is no longer can it handle my manuscript? It's which tool does the job best? For developmental editing, these three are worth your attention:
Claude (claude.ai) remains a favorite among editors for its accuracy and nuanced responses.
Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM, (notebooklm.google.com) specializes at research and analysis—and it cites which exact page it pulled information from, making it easy to verify its work.
Gemini (gemini.google.com) is a strong all-around choice, especially if you're already in the Google ecosystem. It excels at deep research and complex analysis, such as regulatory compliance guides.
If you work primarily in Microsoft Word, it's worth exploring the AI tools that live directly inside Word. Copilot is useful for summarizing lengthy documents or suggesting style consistency improvements, and it now supports tracked changes natively, keeping your edits transparent and auditable the way editors expect. Claude for Word is another option worth a look. It's built specifically for document work, reading through multisection documents, working through comment threads, and revising while preserving your formatting, numbering, and styles. Like Copilot, it proposes edits as native tracked changes so you can review, accept, or reject each one, keeping the human editor in control.
Use AI to supercharge your prep work so your time spent editing inside the text can be more focused.
1. Summaries and Synopses
Prompt the AI to generate a detailed synopsis or chapter-by-chapter summaries so you can quickly get an overview of the material.
Example Synopsis Prompt: Provide a synopsis of this book. Include all main points and key concepts.
2. Supplementary Documents
Developmental editing involves tracking many different elements, as you go, page by page. The right AI tool can do this tracking for you and create documents both you and the writer may find helpful, such as:
Character lists
Setting lists
Plot timelines
Subtopic lists
Glossaries
Example Prompt to Create Supplementary Documents: Extract a list of settings in the book. Include a brief description of each setting.
Analyses to Identify Issues
Think of the problem areas authors tend to struggle with and ask the AI to analyze them. You can receive structured analyses while leaving room for your creative editorial influence and decision-making. Here are four examples:
3. Plot Analysis
If you know the plot’s intended framework, prompt the AI to fit plot points onto that template to highlight where the plot may be misaligned.
Example Prompt for Plot Analysis: Map the plot onto the Freytag’s pyramid story structure.
Follow-Up to the Plot Analysis Prompt: Explain how well the plot follows the Freytag’s pyramid story structure.
4. Character Analysis
You can get help with determining whether the characters make quality heroes or villains, whether they’re relatable, and more. Prompt the AI about the overall strengths and weaknesses of a specific character.
Example Prompt for Character Analysis: Explain the strengths and weaknesses of the main character's arc and offer suggestions for improvement.
5. Content Gap Analysis
When working with nonfiction, you can prompt the AI to look for areas where adding subtopics could make the work feel more complete.
Example Prompt: Review chapter 3 and list subtopics the author could add or expand to make the book more comprehensive.
6. Structural Analysis
Structural analysis works with both fiction and nonfiction. Use AI to probe whether the structure fits the expectations of the genre and makes sense.
Example Prompt for Structural Analysis: Analyze the book's structure and list any places where the sequence of arguments lacks logical flow.
Wish you could get a quick second opinion or access your own personal fact-checker while editing? Now you’ve got one. Here are two examples:
7. Consistency Checking
If you question whether you're correctly remembering the detail that seemed unimportant when you read it days ago, ask Gemini Notebook or Claude about it. It will review the copy of the manuscript you’ve attached and answer. For this type of prompt, a simple question will work.
Example Consistency-Checking Prompt: What costume did Poppy’s mother force her to wear for Halloween?
8. Fact Checking
Comprehensive fact checking is typically outside of a developmental editor's duties, but if you need to do this, AI can help. Make sure you have web search turned on and include a request for citations so you can quickly use these sources to verify claims.
Example Fact-Checking Prompt: Fact-check this text. Include a citation for each false claim.
9. Brainstorming
When you come across an element that could be improved, ask AI to brainstorm a list of ideas to fix the issue. They won’t all be keepers, but there will likely be a few you had not considered. Use your experience and editorial judgment to select the best option.
Example Brainstorming Prompt: Suggest plot events that could take place between chapters 3 and 4 to fill in any gaps in the timeline.
You’ll have pages of helpful insights from the analyses the AI conducted at the pre-editing stage. You can use your judgment to select which are valid, put your personal touch on them, and incorporate them into your editorial feedback.
If there are any topics you may need to use careful wording with—such as suggesting the author cut a beloved character or favorite passage—you could ask the AI for guidance with explaining your reasoning. It may sound like a robot wrote it, but AI can quickly get you 80% of the way to the wording you want.
Example Feedback Prompt: Write a compliment sandwich about why chapter 7 should be cut. The first paragraph should focus on a strength of the chapter. The second paragraph should explain why the chapter should be cut. The third paragraph should focus on a positive of the chapter while maintaining the recommendation to cut.
What Are the Challenges of Using AI for Developmental Editing?
AI offers real benefits for developmental editing, but it also has real limitations and requires human oversight.
A common drawback is AI tends to reach for the generic:
Suggesting overused tropes
Defaulting to clichés like ending every chapter on a cliffhanger
Missing the mark on an author’s style, such as pushing back against experimentation in literary fiction.
The bigger limitation is that AI isn’t human. It doesn’t know what it feels like to fall in love, to grieve, to feel out of place. It doesn’t know what it feels like to be human. You do. Your lived experience is exactly why you can gauge a piece’s’s emotional resonance in ways no program can.
Your editorial judgment, emotional intelligence, and hard-won experience are more than useful to the developmental editing process; they’re irreplaceable.
When used well, AI tools like Claude and Gemini Notebook can be powerful partners to developmental editors.
AI brings its massive memory capacity and speedy analysis; you bring your creativity, empathy, and human insight that no AI can replicate. As a team, you help authors sharpen their texts, creating stronger connections and greater impact with their readers.
AI isn’t intended to replace the human editor, only to support them so they can conduct edits that are more efficient, comprehensive, and creative than ever before.
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AI tools evolve quickly—their features, pricing, and data policies can change without much fanfare. The specifics in this article were accurate at publication. Before making decisions based on any tool mentioned here, check its website directly.
Erin Servais is the founder of the AI for Editors courses, the first AI training program built specifically for editorial professionals. Since launching it in August 2023, she has trained editors and content professionals from more than 20 countries, including people from Big Five publishers, Ivy League universities, US government and United Nations agencies, and major tech companies. She has presented on AI in content development for the Book Industry Study Group, the University of Chicago, the UNC Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Media, and the ConVEx conference, and she has written about AI and editing for the Editorial Freelancers Association and the Independent Book Publishers Association. Her work has been featured in Jane Friedman’s The Bottom Line and Mignon Fogarty’s AI Sidequest. A professional editor for more than 20 years, Erin is a former ACES board member and has taught copyediting at UC San Diego Extended Studies.
Have questions? Email Erin → Erin@aiforeditors.com
