Line editing, copy editing, and proofreading:

What’s the difference?

Line editing is a substantive, sentence-by-sentence edit of the entire document or manuscript. For long-form content such as a book manuscript, this is what most people mean when they say they want a copy edit.

Line editing tasks include but are not limited to the following:

  • examining the entire manuscript—every word, sentence, paragraph, section, and chapter

  • correcting typos, wrong words, misspellings, double words, punctuation, run-on sentences, long paragraphs, subheadings, chapter titles, table of contents, author bios, etc.

  • checking facts

  • confirming the spellings of people and place names

  • conduct heavier fact checking (for example, exact titles of movies in italics, death date of a famous person in history, the protagonist was using an iPhone before they were invented).

  • making suggestions about moving or removing text and sometimes making the change and explaining why in a comment or other note

  • initiating a discussion about why some text could be cut

  • querying the writer/author about inconsistencies

  • pointing out repetition and inconsistencies in the story line or text, but not rewriting

  • revising awkward sentences, breaking up long sentences, and streamlining sentences with clauses and parentheticals

  • substituting stronger words for commonly overused words

  • ensuring bias-free language

Copy editing is polishing for mechanical issues and can be sufficient for short-form content, such as blog posts, articles, white papers, etc.

Copy editing tasks include but are not limited to the following:

  • correcting typos, which includes misspelled words

  • filling in missing words

  • formatting details, such as ensuring just one space between sentences

  • streamlining punctuation and ensuring proper use of commas, periods, and em dashes

  • avoiding overuse of ellipses to denote a break in thought (they are really used to indicate missing text) and exclamation marks

  • ensuring the names of characters and places are spelled consistently throughout

  • finding and replacing similarly sounding words that have different meanings (e.g., effect and affect)

  • conducting a modest fact check (doing a Google search to confirm correct spellings for proper names, places, book titles, etc.)

  • creating new paragraphs to break up long passages

  • questioning the use of song lyrics, book passages, etc. and confirming with the writer/author that they got written permission

  • imposing a consistent style for the text (Associate Press style or Chicago Manual of Style), depending on the content type

Proofreading is the last chance to catch absolute errors before content gets printed or goes live online, and includes checking for such things as:

  • hyphen stacks (many words hyphenated at the ends of lines)

  • widows and orphans (single words or lines at the top or bottom of a page)

  • wrong captions with photos

  • page numbering

  • missing and misspelled headers and footers

  • page numbering matches with the table of contents

  • name misspellings

  • wrong URLs and/or bad URLs

  • numbers that don’t add up in a table

  • double words

  • missing words

  • bad word breaks and hyphenation at the end of a line

Let’s talk about how I can help make your words shine.