A line edit is all about rhythm, clarity, and tone. It’s about ensuring that what you’ve written on the page is what you actually mean to say. It’s about the logic by which your paragraphs and sentences flow, and the music they create in the reader’s mind. In a line edit, I will:
• Identify problems including wordiness, ambiguity, redundancy, weak verbs, the misuse or overuse of adjectives and adverbs, clichés, errors in continuity, and logical inconsistencies.
• Correct or suggest rewrites to sentences, striving always to retain the work's meaning and voice.
• Return an electronic version of the manuscript with edits highlighted in tracked changes and comments and questions included in the margin.
A line edit inevitably includes some light copy editing, because while making improvements at the sentence level, I will also correct basic mechanical errors.
“As I wrote, I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required what a friend calls ‘putting every word on trial for its life.’”