Strategies for Line- level Revisions:
Finishing a full draft of a novel is an impressive achievement. However, the journey doesn't end there. After completing rounds of developmental revisions, focusing on plot development, character arcs, setting, and world-building, comes the phase of post-developmental edits, often termed as line edits.
These revisions aim to refine the sentences, enhancing their style and impact, ensuring the message and purpose of the book are conveyed clearly and effectively. During line editing, concentrating on grammar and punctuation is not advisable; those aspects are addressed during the proofreading stage.
Line editing is about improving the manuscript's style, tone, clarity, consistency, diction, and syntax, keeping readers connected from the beginning to the end. In this piece, we offer some advice to make line edits as efficient and painless as possible.
Strategies for Line Edits
Establishing Distance
To gain the objectivity needed to identify the manuscript's issues, set your book aside for at least a few days before starting line edits—preferably longer if possible. Other methods to create distance include reading something from a different genre or studying a craft novel.
Begin with Simple Changes
Warm up to the line editing mindset by focusing on the easy stuff initially—removing redundancies, clichés, and other fillers. Create a list of frequently used phrases to replace with more original alternatives.
Revising Adverbs
Examining your word choice is a significant aspect of line editing that enables the story, characters, dialogue, setting, and descriptions to become more vivid and unique. A great way to start is by questioning the necessity of adverbs. While they may seem to provide important information concisely, removing adverbs often creates opportunities to express characters' emotions more effectively.
Varying Sentence Lengths
To keep each paragraph engaging, try varying sentence lengths. Identifying parts of the book that seem to drag or where clarity is muddled can be achieved by counting the words in each paragraph, allowing for better flow.
Reading Aloud
If you find it challenging to "see the forest for the trees," it may be time to change the experience. If possible, ask a friend to read your book out loud, or read it yourself to spot stubbornly unwieldy passages or confusing sections.
Useful Pro Tips
- If needed, ask new beta readers to provide specific feedback on redundancies, clichés, and ineffective diction.
- Remaining objective throughout line editing can be difficult. Experiment with revising chapters out of order, reading them backward, or switching to a different medium, such as printing and marking up your book physically.
The ultimate goal of line editing is to polish the manuscript's language, making the text more engaging and readable while enhancing clarity and coherence, refining the style and voice, and maximizing the emotional impact for an unforgettable reading experience.
- After polishing the plot, characters, and settings, one should focus on refining the language and style by engaging in line edits, which involve improving the manuscript's clarity, consistency, diction, and syntax to create an engaging and unforgettable reading experience.
- To make line edits more manageable and efficient, consider creating distance from the manuscript by setting it aside for a few days or reading something from a different genre; warm up to the task by focusing on easy changes like removing redundancies and clichés, and aim to vary sentence lengths to maintain an interesting flow throughout the text.
