Editing 101: What is a Line Edit?
By Melissa Burnham
If you read our blog post on structural editing, you know we like to use the analogy of building a house. Foundational edits and structural edits are the first step—the foundation and structure of the house.
Line editing is like installing the plumbing and electrical wiring and adding flooring and cabinets to your house. After a round of structural editing, we know your foundation is solid—plot holes have been filled in, characters have been rounded out, and setting details have become more vibrant. As the name suggests, line editing involves going through the story line by line and making changes—looking for awkward syntax, confusing metaphors, writer crutches (e.g., recurring phrases or words), and conflicting details. The exact process will differ between editors, but these are the basics you can expect.
The terms line edit and copy edit are often used interchangeably (depending on who you ask or the industry you’re in, the terms may have subtle differences), but for our purposes, the differences are insubstantial.
When we complete a line edit, we use the Track Changes tool in Microsoft Word. That way, you can see all the changes we made and decide if you agree or not and whether you’d like to keep the change. For any substantial changes, we include a comment explaining why we made the change. We also format the manuscript to industry standards (font size, margins, indents, etc.) and create a style guide, which includes character names and basic details, place names, formatting of numbers, this versus that spelling (i.e., both are correct, but we picked one), and other details that will be specific to your manuscript. A style guide will help you keep all the choices made in your manuscript consistent and will be particularly helpful if you’re writing a series and need to reference what you decided in the first book.
For an example of what you can expect from a line edit, check out the short sample edit on our website, or to take a look at all of the editing services we offer, check out the Services page.
By Melissa Burnham