Line Editing
You’re ready for a Line Edit if your completed manuscript has already seen major revision—through solid self-editing or a developmental edit—but needs polish and revising on the sentence level. Line Editing focuses on the page rather than the story, looking at your unique style for consistency, tone, and flow.
Because of this, Line Editing is the most delicate stage of the editing process. A line-by-line examination of your work means someone can easily superimpose their words and style over your own.
Rates starting at $0.022 USD per word
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But a true and proper Line Edit enhances and highlights your voice and complements your book’s tone, and I take great care to ensure the integrity of your work while being particularly good at mimicking writing styles in my suggestions.
During a Line Edit, I’m looking for . . .
- Readability (or Flow): This is a bit of a catch-all, but readability means I’ll be on the hunt for anything distracting or clunky. I’m looking for words, phrases, and sentences that make me pause or interrupt the reading experience. Do your sentences fit together naturally? This is Line Editing’s main job!
- Stylistic Changes: This refers to your writing style. Sometimes you get into your unique groove and then it derails and you don’t notice. A woman from the Deep South might suddenly sound Jamaican on the page. Maybe you wrote a robust, long-winded description of a building. It’s a good passage, but it’s a deviation from your style because you don’t consistently write beautiful paragraphs about architecture, so Line Editing is likely to help you shave it down into its most essential parts.
- Unexplained Tone Changes: Perhaps you wrote a scene that was meant to bring levity to a chapter. It reads fine to you because your intention is ingrained; you know what you meant to say. But to a reader it may feel off or ring untrue due to word choice. So this part of Line Editing is about making sure what you intended to be on the page is actually on the page.
- Tense Issues: Passive voice is the killer of forward momentum in a book. For example, “The plushie was tossed onto the sofa.” Active voice is (almost) always preferred: “She tossed the plushie onto the sofa.” But there’s also the more basic tense issues that crop up on the page. Maybe you wrote, “I had it!” but you meant “I have it!”
- Repetitive Words/Phrases: Most writers have “writerly ticks” they just can’t shake. Maybe you love the description “golden sun” and use it four times on one page. Frequent usage like that is a distraction for readers, so it’s best to cut down that use to one or two impactful moments where the words can shine.
- Filler Words: I’m also looking for extra words that can generally be removed and not change the sentence’s tone or meaning. Some examples of filler words are that, like, just, very, and really.
Occasionally, I offer a combined line and copy edit to authors. I do this on a case-by-case basis if I believe your book can handle two edits at once without risk of redoing work later.
If I’m doing a Line and Copy Edit, I’m looking for . . .
- Everything in the Line Editing section above
- Dialect Consistency: Books published in English are written in either American or British English—Australian English most resembles British English. The dialects have many spelling differences, such as color/colour, armor/armour, etc., but British and American English also have unique grammar and word usage rules and colloquialisms.
- Grammatical Consistency: My default style guide is the Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS), and I use that to check grammar and usage rules for texts. On top of that, there are some words that almost always slip through spellcheck because they’re homophones: bare/bear, there/their/they’re, accept/except, effect/affect, insure/ensure, and tons more. I’ll also be looking for doubled words like, “He flipped the the page.”
- Punctuation Accuracy: This is where we make sure our I’s are dotted and our T’s are crossed. I’m on the lookout for misplaced commas or comma splices, wonky en dashes that should be an em dash, if that em dash should be there at all, and all the same for semicolons and colons. On top of that, I’ll be paying attention to possible exclamation point overuse and removing doubles like !! or !?.
- Standardized Style: The style of your page is all about what it looks like. Are all new paragraphs aligned and spaced correctly from the left and right margins? Are your dialogue tags correct, and are the quotation marks the same style across the board? I’ll also make sure any internal dialogue is italicized with no quotation marks and spaced as spoken dialogue.
Mistakes slip through the cracks during early editing stages when you’re focused on the structure and content of your story, so copyediting’s job is to comb through and clean up!