Line Edit Like a Pro (Here’s How)

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Now that you’re done crafting your story and developmentally editing it for structure and needed elements, it’s time to perform a line edit, in which you check whether each sentence leads to the next and the next.

Line editing, though it sometimes goes by different names (heavy copyedit, substantive edit, language edit) is the bridge between developmental editing and copy editing, massaging the language for information delivery, while retaining the story and preparing the manuscript for the buffing and polishing stage as it makes its way toward publication.

A professional editor does, indeed, check a manuscript line by line, looking at and scrutizing every word for relevance, message, and appropriateness. Through a line edit, your editor will look at the structure of your writing, including your meaning, syntax, concision, and word choices, which affect the tone of your work.

Let’s look at line editing and how to pull it off like a pro:

Prompted by Fallon Clark via Adobe Firefly

“Line editing” is a misnomer

Through the line edit, you’re examining every sentence independently to make sure it says what it’s supposed to say in an accessible and situationally authentic and appropriate way. Right?

Well, yes, but line editing is so much more than editing at the sentence level. In an effective line edit, your reader will feel compelled to continue reading for the sheer joy of the unfolding narrative, one that unravels bit by bit, and leads your reader to an experience because a good line edit focuses on meaning.

To center your line edit for meaning, first understand the function of a line edit: Examine paragraphs of text, the arrangement of sentences into logical groups, and the arrangement of words into logical sentences, that pull through the common story thread and link all your characters, events, ideas, and settings together into a thing called a “story.”

As an exercise, take any commercially available novel in your personal collection, choose one scene, and, using a highlighter or other tool, highlight the first full paragraph, the first and last lines of subsequent paragraphs plus all dialogue, and the last full paragraph. Then, read only your highlights.

Here’s a particularly short scene from Matt Haig’s novel, The Midnight Library, to get you thinking at the line level:

The sky was full of heavy soot-grey clouds, as if providing a celestial echo of Nora’s mind, as she wandered around Bedford in search of a reason to exist. The town was a conveyor belt of despair. The pebble-dashed sports centre where her dead dad once watched her swim lengths of the pool, the Mexican restaurant where she’d taken Dan for fajitas, the hospital where her mum had her treatment.

Dan had texted her yesterday.

Nora, I miss your voice. Can we talk? D x

She’d said she was stupidly hectic (big lol). . . My life is chaos, he’d told her, via drunken texts, shortly after the would-be wedding she’d pulled out of two days before.

The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. . . Maybe it was basic existence, too.

You’d lose your job, then more shit happens.

The wind whispered through the trees.

It began to rain.

She headed towards the shelter of a newsagent’s, with the deep — and as it happened, correct, sense that things were about to get worse.

Despite missing the meaty middle of those two center paragraphs, the missing sentences of which are indicated with ellipses, the meaning is clear: Nora is having a bad day, and her day is about to get a whole lot worse. The initial paragraph sets the tone of the scene, and each “highlighted” sentence leads the reader to the next thought or idea. And in the chopped up bits, we also learn Nora broke off a wedding — a huge life event summed up in about seven words because the event happened before the story began.

When line editing your novel, go through the paragraph-highlighting exercise as described. Even without all the filler found in the middles of paragraphs, the meaning of your highlighted scene should be clear. If the meaning isn’t clear, your paragraph probably needs work. Think about your meaning, what you want your reader to get from the scene, and rearrange first your paragraphs, then your sentences within paragraphs, until you achieve your vision.

Smoothing reader stumbling blocks at the line level

While every editor describes a line edit slightly differently, there are two major constants:

  • Line edits always follow story development; and
  • Line edits prepare the manuscript for copyediting and proofreading.

Line edits follow story development logically. After all, there’s no sense hammering away at individual sentences if the entire paragraph or scene is ultimately going to be cut for the sake of the story.

However, the constant that line edits prepare the manuscript for copyediting and proofreading is a little more nuanced.

While copyediting also focuses on the sentence level, copyediting itself is more about consistency than creativity, helping to correct egregious errors, conforming the manuscript to a specific style guide (like the MetaStellar Stylebook), and smoothing the language so the reader doesn’t get confused or lost.

Line editing, though, is about reader engagement. Of course, line editors will fix typos and word-choice issues they come across, the focus of the line edit is to resolve lingering developmental issues (like cutting info dumps), trimming overwritten passages, and sharpening dialogue.

Beyond your standard word-processing spellcheck and browsing for commonly confused words, here are some things a professional editor looks for when examining your sentences at the line level:

Syntax

Syntax is how you arrange your words and phrases into well-formed and meaningful sentences within the rules of language. While examining the syntax of your sentences, your line editor makes sure every sentence has a subject and a verb, if not a predicate, like this example from The Outfield’s song, “Your Love:”

  • Syntactically correct: Josie’s on a vacation far away.
  • Syntactically incorrect:  Josie, who’s on a faraway vacation.

The syntactically incorrect example is a sentence fragment, an incomplete thought that leaves readers scratching their heads and wondering what they’re missing. In the syntactically correct version, “Josie is” represents a complete sentence, like “I am” (though as a two-word sentence, you wouldn’t use the contraction).  The subject, Josie, is doing the “is”ing, and she’s doing it on a vacation far away, the predicate.

While looking for head-scratching incomplete thoughts, your editor will also check to make sure the order of your adjectives follows the correct sequence, and that your verb tenses and pronoun uses are consistent and clear.

Note: Some modern grammar tools like ProWritingAid and Grammarly will help you catch some syntactical errors that you may otherwise miss, but don’t rely solely on your grammar checkers because they can’t understand context. Those tools will miss syntax problems while destroying good dialogue and well-honed character voices and assure you, à la Ralph Wiggum, they’re helping.

Concision

While line editing doesn’t focus solely on the big picture of writing — that’s what a developmental edit is for — it does look at every line for concision, such as transforming voice from passive to active in certain contexts, removing redundancies, eliminating unnecessary qualifiers, and tightening the prose.

Here are some examples and how to work with them to get you started:

  • Passive voice: Fun was had by us. Rewritten in the active form: We had fun.
  • Blatant redundancy: Welcome to the department of redundancies department. Without the unnecessarily duplicated word: Welcome to the redundancies department.
  • Hidden redundancy: Her sweatshirt was charcoal black. Since charcoal and black are, visually, the same color, choose one: Her sweatshirt was charcoal.
  • Unnecessary qualifier: I felt my cheek smash the sidewalk. Since the feeling is inherent in the smash, the qualifier is unnecessary: My cheek smashed the sidewalk.

Again, your chosen grammar tool will help you catch some concision issues, but they simply cannot and won’t catch everything, including many redundancies, and may ask you to write sentences into the active voice when the passive fits better for the situation. (There’s a reason attorneys use the passive voice.)

And while your tool may flag sense verbs (e.g.: felt, saw, touched, smelled, heard, tasted) as overused, only you can decide whether that overuse is appropriate for the sentence you’re editing. Look at what needs to be said and who needs to say it, and go from there.

Word Choice

Word choice is a funky aspect of line editing for one simple reason: It’s personal.

Personal things are highly subjective things, and word-choice editing is a highly subjective practice. While it’s important to avoid jargon so you don’t risk completely losing your reader, word choice also comes down to narrative voice, characterization, and context.

If you’re writing a story like “Nightraven, Highway 9” by Wendy Nikel, using jargon like “code” contextually makes sense, and the reader doesn’t get lost even if their work includes no number- or color-coding system. Yet, even jargon isn’t terribly straightforward because it can be generational, industry-specific, or otherwise inaccessible.

When examining word choice, you’ll need to move slowly, reading every word individually so your trickster brain doesn’t inadvertently fill in the gaps for you because some grammar and spelling checkers will overlook some whopper-sized errors:

  • Pubic VS public (the pubic bone; the public building)
  • Scape VS escape (harvesting scapes; making one’s escape)
  • Mature VS manure (fine wines and people mature; farmers use manure)
  • Everyday VS every day (everyday tasks like showering; I shower every day)

Note: Microsoft Word and Google Docs can both read your writing to you, and I highly recommend using a read-aloud tool to weed out word-choice issues that you may otherwise read over. Again, the brain has a way of seeing what it wants to see, which is not always the same as seeing what’s written in the text on your page.

So, how do you handle your line edits? Share tips, techniques, bloopers, and examples below.

Happy writing!

♥ Fal

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Fallon Clark is a story development coach and editor with more than a decade of experience in communications, project management, writing, and editing. She provides story development and revision services to independent and hybrid publishers and authors spanning genres and styles. And in 2018, she had the joy of seeing Forever My Girl, one of her earliest book projects, on the big screen. Fallon’s writing has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine and The MicroZine. Find her online at FallonClarkBooks.Substack.com, or connect with her on LinkedIn or Substack.

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