Levels of edit (or levels of editing) describes a cumulative or categorical scheme for revising text. Beginning as a tool that helped standardize communication between writers and editors at a government laboratory, published information about levels of edit was later made available to the general public. Subsequently, others developed a variety of levels of edit, which are now accessible through print and web-based resources. History Van Buren and Buehler of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) developed five levels of edit defined by nine editorial categories. Coordination: Consider version and circulation, Consider the review cycles Policy: Consider the organizational structure Integrity: Are sources noted? Screening: Consider spelling. Are visuals/art presented with clarity? Copy clarification: Are images legible? Are images trimmed? Format: What are the layout conventions? What are the typographical conventions? Mechanical style: Check spelling and usage. Language: Make edits for clarity and concision. Substantive Level 1 includes all of the above categories, while Level 5 includes only Policy and Coordination. 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. Several chapters in New Perspectives on Technical Editing, edited by Avon J. Murphy, include discussions of the different types of edits. 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. Turning pages (a superficial look of the text) Skimming (correcting obvious errors