This is Part 3 in a 4-part series. Part 1 covers the self-editing process, while Parts 2–4 dive into common issues to look for as you revise your work-in-progress.
What is Line Editing?
Simply put, line editing is all about style, voice, flow, and clarity. Best completed after you’ve finished fixing major story-level issues, line editing smooths clunky or unclear sentences, ensures that your narrative and character voices are consistent throughout the book, and checks that the writing matches the mood of each scene.
In this post, I’ll list the most common issues I see writers running into when I’m line editing. Hopefully, this will help you know what to look out for during language-focused manuscript revisions.
Related: Self-Editing Part 1: Getting Started
Sentences with Poor Flow
This is one of the most basic issues: sentences that just sound and look off. Often, it’s because you’re using passive voice—sentences that leave out the subject, or doer, of the action. (For more on passive voice, check out this article from Grammarly.) It could also be because you’ve tried to fit too much into one sentence, or because there’s a deeper grammatical issue in the sentence structure.
Luckily, there’s a pretty easy way to catch them: reading aloud. Many writers find that hearing their work read aloud—whether they read it themselves or they’re using a text-to-speech feature like the one on Microsoft Word—allows them to quickly catch and fix awkward sentences.
Repetitive Sentence Structure
“Harry ran through the meadow. He saw a dog. He tried to pet it. He got scared when the dog barked. He ran back inside his house.”
Not exactly prize-winning stuff, right? While I’m purposely using extremely simple sentences to prove a point, you can see how having a string of sentences that start the same way and use the same structure gets boring quickly. If you notice more than two or perhaps three sentences together that have very similar length and structure, you should probably find ways to change it up. Unless, that is, you’re using it on purpose to create a specific effect in a defined moment. If used well and sparingly, repetitive sentence structure can be used to create narrative texture or demonstrate character emotion.
Repetitive Action Tags
I get it: it’s hard to describe the ways people respond and communicate their emotions in original ways. Smiling, nodding, scratching heads, frowning, laughing, clenching fists, gritting teeth, glancing—it’s easy to fall into the trap of using a common action again and again to show body language-related reactions. If you find yourself relying too much on a small set of action tags, you might want to spend some time trying to change it up. Many authors get help from resources like The Emotion Thesaurus to help them keep things feeling fresh.
Dialogue or Action Tag Imbalances
Dialogue tags are essential in dialogue. They quickly show the reader who is speaking and help them picture what’s going on with their body language as they’re talking. But they can be overused. You don’t want every piece of dialogue tagged with “he said” or “she said,” especially if the reader can deduce who is speaking without them. Similarly, you don’t want to place an action tag with each piece of dialogue, because it could start to feel a bit forced or even compete with the dialogue itself.
Dialogue and action tags can also be underused. Even in a conversation with only two people, you’ll still want to sprinkle in a few here and there to add texture and keep the dialogue from mimicking a script—unless, of course, that is exactly what you’re going for.
Adverbs
I do not personally believe in ruling out an entire part of speech in any type of writing. However, current writing style tends to dictate that we use them as sparingly as possible in narrative writing, if at all. And, I think, for good reason—when writers start relying too much on adverbs, they stop showing action and fall into telling it instead.
Adverbs are fairly easy to spot: the vast majority of them end in -ly. Quickly. Softly. Loudly. Sadly. Kindly. Stiffly. You get the idea. An adverb here or there is fine, but if you’re using more than a few on a page, you’re probably telling too much of the story rather than showing it.
Wrapping Up
At the end of the day, this is the priority of line editing—to help the reader stay in the narrative. You don’t want readers to stop in the middle of a page to reread a sentence two or three times to figure out what it’s saying. You don’t want them to pull out of the story because they are annoyed by a repeated sentence structure, an overuse of adverbs, or the absence of dialogue tags. Keep this priority in mind as you revise your manuscript, and you’ll be well on your way to creating an engaging narrative that a reader won’t want to put down.
Watch for Part 4, which will cover self-editing for correctness, coming next week!