Everything You Need to Know About Line-Editing
Line-Editing falls under the umbrella of technical edits too. It is a higher level of technical edits that focuses on improving the quality of the prose. Whereas Developmental-editing looks at improving the whole story, Line-editing focuses on the paragraph and sentence-level when searching for improvement opportunities.
An average line editor will look for:
Clarity weaknesses. Reduces ambiguity in a sentence to make it easier to understand.
Fluency weaknesses. Awkward sentence structure or word choice can ruin the reader experience, and grind everything to a halt.
Flow weaknesses. This can be sentence-level or apply to whole paragraphs. It usually takes the form of odd/weak pacing. An editor may attempt a rewrite or to propose deleting sentences wholesale.
Clarity, fluency, and flow are thrown around quite often. They can be distilled into two ideas. They seek to make the prose easier to understand and easier to read, which may sound like the same thing, but are quite different.
Making something easier to read might involve cutting out filler or bloat, or by adjusting the arrangement of words. Easier to understand might mean tightening up a metaphor, clarifying dialogue, or making a description pop.
A good line editor will go a level deeper and retain some recollection of the previous paragraphs, they will look for:
Run-on sentences or comma-splice issues.
Filler or bloated prose.
Repeated word. This can include: reusing adjectives, starting two or three sentences in the same way, over usage of pronouns in a few sentences, etc.
Passive sentence structure or wording.
Loose dialogue and/or action beats. This delves slightly into rewrites, and the scope of it depends greatly on the quality and cost of the editor.
Adverb and/or conjunction overusage. Not to say these are wrong, but overusing them can be grating on the reader.
It’s common for a bad line editor to:
Miss entire paragraphs.
Have a visible decline of quality in later pages.
Ignore or suggest repetitive sentence or paragraph structure. This issue is particularly insidious because it’s easy to miss if the client or the editor isn’t paying close attention. Ctrl+F searching for repeated words is easy, but you have to actually read the prose to notice a repeated sentence structure.
Now that you have a good grasp on Line-Editing, consider checking out our Editing Types post, where we go over the 5 Steps of Editing under a simplified framework.