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3 Integrity
4 Screening
5 Copy clarification
6 Format

7 Mechanical style
8 Language
9 Substantive

In 1976, JPL first published Van Buren and Buehler’s work as
The Levels of Edit JPL published a second edition in 1980, and the
United States Government Printing Office (GPO) sold copies of the
book to the general public. After the GPO’s supply of the second

edition was depleted, the Society for Technical Communication (STC)
made available a facsimile reprint of the second edition.
Drawing on Van Buren and Buehler’s work, in 1985 the writing

and editing group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory established
four levels of edit for technical reports. A team at the laboratory
revised the work following a 1994 survey that indicated the original

four levels no longer met authors’ needs. The Los Alamos revision
presented three “author-based” levels of edit (proofreading edit,
grammar edit, and full edit) whose goals were to “simplify the editing

process, focus editing on improving technical clarity, and ensure that
value was added in editing.”
More recently, Rude reduced the levels to just two types: 1)
comprehensive editing and 2) copyediting.

Other researchers built schemes based on editing rules, tasks,
and analyses. For example, Tarutz defined a hierarchy of levels that
Corbin and Oestreich referred to in their presentation at the 2011 STC

Summit as “informal,” as follows.
1 Turning pages (a superficial look of the text)
2 Skimming (correcting obvious errors of spelling, grammar, and
punctuation)

3 Skimming and comparing (seeking internal consistency,
including cross-references)
4 Reading (improving writing style, such as wording and usage)

5 Analyzing (identifying and fixing organizational flaws, missing
information, redundancy, and technical inconsistency)
6 Testing and using (fixing technical errors and resolving usability

problems)