Substantive Editing requires the most amount of editing work to bring the text to a level acceptable for submission to peer review. Substantive level manuscripts may need editing for grammar, structure, journal requirements, conciseness and general readability. Substantive manuscripts will likely have several comments regarding unclear sentences that will usually need to be further revised after the comments are responded to by the author. Few manuscripts (4%) are so unclearly written that they require a full Substantive edit.
Comment from the above sample