Line editing – focuses on the language, tone, pacing, and organization of your sentences and paragraphs.

• Are your paragraphs organized well? Is there a sentence in one that belongs somewhere else?
• Is your writing wordy and repetitive? Or, in contrast, do you skip ahead too quickly and leave your reader confused?
• Does your writing shift in tone? Do you move from formal to casual and back again in jarring ways?
• Do you use the same words or phrases overmuch, in ways that make your writing redundant and boring?
• Is your word choice imprecise and vague in places? Did you write “walked” when you meant “meandered”? Do you rely on clichés?

Copyediting – focuses on correcting spelling, grammar, and punctuation, while ensuring consistency at both the micro and macro levels.

• Do you use the wrong homophone: “there” when you meant “their”? “Instillation” instead of “installation”? “Principle” instead of “principal”?
• Do you know when to use a hyphen vs. an em dash vs. an en dash? A comma vs. a semi-colon vs. a colon?
• Are there cringe-worthy typos sprinkled liberally throughout your manuscript?
• Do you know when to write “eleven” instead of “11”?
• Does one of your protagonists have a mole on their left shoulder that sometimes switches to their right shoulder?
• Is your bibliography formatted correctly according to the appropriate style guide (e.g., Chicago Manual of Style, APA, AMA, etc.)?

As part of the copyediting service, I will create a style sheet for you to help ensure that the treatment of numbers, terms and their spellings, punctuation, characters and so on remains consistent throughout your manuscript.

Here’s a website that elaborates on the difference between line editing and copyediting and provides examples of each: http://nybookeditors.com/2015/01/copyediting-vs-line-editing/.