An editor who works at the sentence and paragraph level, refining your prose for clarity, flow, rhythm, and style.
A line editor reads your manuscript sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, making your prose sharper and more effective. They're not rearranging your plot or fixing your spelling. They're looking at how you say things: awkward phrasing, unclear antecedents, clunky transitions, repetitive sentence structures, places where the voice drifts. A good line editor makes your writing sound more like the best version of you, not like them.
Strong structure keeps readers turning pages, but beautiful prose is what makes them underline sentences and text quotes to their friends. Line editing is where your writing goes from functional to compelling. Most writers can't fully line-edit their own work because they read what they meant to write, not what's actually on the page. A skilled line editor closes that gap.
Lish's aggressive line editing shaped Carver's famously spare prose style. Some stories were cut by more than half. It's one of the most debated editor-author relationships in literary history.
Covici's line-level attention helped Steinbeck achieve the deceptively simple prose that makes the novella hit so hard emotionally.
Morrison's lyrical, precise prose was partly the product of meticulous line-level revision, both her own and her editor's. Every word in that book earns its place.
Take a page of your draft and read each sentence out loud. Mark any sentence where you stumble, lose the rhythm, or have to re-read to understand. Now rewrite just those sentences, focusing on clarity and flow. Try to cut at least 10% of the words without losing meaning. This is what a line editor does across your entire manuscript.