Line editing - the final step by Tony Noland

 

After you've gotten through all the drafts, from the horrible first draft to the luscious final draft... after you've had your beta readers go over it all and find what can be made better... after you've got it 99% complete... then comes the line editing.

ANALOGY ALERT: If writing is deciding what outfit to wear and how to wear it, prose editing is improvements to the overall look: switching to a different color tie, switching from gold earrings to silver, etc. Line editing is the final stage of correction and polish. It is the last straightening of the tie and smoothing of the jacket, the final plucking of the single stray eyebrow hair that separates "pretty" from "beautiful".

It takes a special kind of eye to do line editing, primarily because line editing is picky work. In a perfect world, you turn your work over to the publisher, who has a crack team of wizened, beady-eyed line editing trolls chained in the basement. Manuscripts are flung through the bars of the trapdoor, thence to be pounced on by these detail-oriented monsters, whose chief delight is the sinking of razor-sharp talons into your prose. The publisher gives them a nice juicy piece of fresh rat meat for every stray comma or errant verb tense they catch, and a hard stripe across the back with a split bamboo rod for every one they miss. The trolls have learned to be very good at their jobs.

Alas, not all of us work with professional editors and publishers. This isn't to say that you can't line edit yourself. It just means you have to be as single minded about it as the trolls. After lavishing so much love and heartache over every phrase and plot twist in your piece of work, how can you line edit yourself effectively? Become inhuman in your quest to find and fix all the mechanical issues. By the time you get to line editing, all the creative writing and editing is complete. Now you are making everything consistent, smooth and flawlessly beautiful.

Here are some line editing guidelines I was given for a project I recently contributed to, the anthology "100 Stories for Queensland":

• Please be sensitive and respectful during editing. We are asking only for line editing for grammar, spelling, punctuation, readability-flow (removing that etc.) and continuity. Please feel free to also remove any unnecessary speech tags, especially in the case of it being a repetition of ‘he said, she said’. There are no major structural edits to be undertaken on any story - that is no rewrites. If you have concerns about an aspect of any story please contact the senior editors.


• All stories are to be saved as .doc (please no .docx)


• All stories are to be converted to font: Times New Roman, 11 points.


• Line spacing should only be single.


• Please put the story name at the beginning of the document in capital with “by Authors name” underneath.


• Quotations all need to be curlies, double for speech, single for other used. For those who don’t know, you can convert by going to the Replace function in word and typing “ into the find and “ into the replace. It works the same with ‘. You can’t use the replace function though to change singles into doubles.


• All dashes need to be em-dashes with no spaces on either side.


• Ellipses are formatted with no space before and one after (as per our house style guidelines) if used in the middle of text.


• Please ensure there is also only one space after full stops (again you can do a search and replace to do this easily)


• Please convert any italics to UNDERLINE to assist the page layout - italics are often eaten by the design programmes.


• Paragraphs are to begin with indents (6mm) and section breaks are to be three carriage returns (not a collection of ***s) with the exception of the first paragraph of each section.l


• Please remove everything else from the document including headers and footers and any other identifying information which does not need to be there. Each document should only contain the text of the story, the title and the name of the author.

We had dozens of writers, all using different styles of punctuation, formatting and spelling (US vs. UK vs. AUS), a far more difficult mix than even a longer product of a single hand. How best to approach this kind of list of requirements? Taking care of all of these fussy details would drive anyone crazy, right? Yes, it would. So, the secret to line editing is to NOT take care of all of these fussy details... at least, not all at once, and not all in the same pass. If you are going on a formatting hunt to change straight quotes to curly, do that and nothing else. Line after line, page after page, you are ONLY looking for quotation marks to fix. Having fixed every one in the entire document, start over with the next item on the line editing list, such as the conversion of ellipses. Next comes the hunt for stray commas. Next comes the paragraph indents. Next comes etc., etc., etc.

Some people start on page one and work forwards, others start on the final page and work backwards. Either way, all you are looking for is a single kind of error per pass. This kind of multiple pass also helps catch the kind of mistakes that we are all far too experienced writers to be making, but still do. For example, it's nice to be sure your heroine's name is ALWAYS spelled Kathryn and not Catherine (as it was back in the first draft), and that your hero's eyes are ALWAYS blue-green, not gray-blue (another first draft holdover).

It sounds like this would be torturously tedious and boring, but in fact, the pages mostly zip by. If you are ignoring all the text so as to focus on the punctuation, spacing and formatting, you cover a lot of ground pretty quickly. Each pass is further aided by universal find-and-replace. Ctrl-A selects the entire document in Microsoft Word, so making everything the same font size and style is quick and painless. Ditto for single space after periods. Since you shouldn't completely trust Word, however, the final pass through the text is indispensable.

Take it one step at a time, and even the most fussily precise list of line editing requirements is nothing to be afraid of. If you pay attention to the line editing details, your manuscript won't just look good - it will be beautiful.