You may be familiar with the term ‘line editing’ and wonder why it’s not listed in my services.
The term has for a long time been less commonly used in the UK than in the US, but things are changing in that respect, and wherever you’re from, you may well wonder what line editing is and whether you need it – or you may even have come here searching for that service!
Different editors use terminology differently, and I perform line editing under the umbrella of copyediting. Line editing deals with your writing on a paragraph and sentence level, and it concerns itself with areas that tend to be subjective, such as style, tone, rhythm, voice and other things that aren’t always easily bound by ‘rules’.
All these things are included in what I would call a ‘heavy copyedit’. All copyediting will include some stuff that’s a bit subjective – if it was limited to absolutely essential changes, it would be more like proofreading, after all! – but there are, of course, different degrees of intervention. In my opinion, the most important thing is that we agree on the brief, the approach, and the level of intervention – the ‘heaviness’ of the edit – before beginning work. So feel free to ask me about line editing if that’s what you’re looking for!