Substantive Editing: The Art of the Alchemist
http://www.stc.org/confproceed/1994/PDFs/PG1618.PDF

Malone, Jacquelyn and Alma L. Nahigian
STC Proceedings
1994

Abstract:

For any number of reasons — and it's often not the writer's fault — an editor is asked to help transform a document. Water into wine, a specification into a user document. The editor job, from the first draft to the last, is to ensure that the Writing meets the user's need, which sometimes means the document goes through a transformation: lead into gold.