/line-editing

Line Edit Checklist

Work one paragraph at a time. For each check, the question comes first; the fix is a suggestion, and the author's voice overrides it. Match the edit weight the author chose (light, medium, heavy).

Clarity

• Who is doing what? Each sentence's subject and verb should be easy to find. Buried subjects (It was the sound of the bell that woke her) become direct (The bell woke her) unless the delay is the point.
• Pronoun reference. Every he, she, they, it points to one person or thing. Two same-gender characters in a paragraph is where this breaks; use a name.
• Sequence. Actions appear in the order they happen, and cause before effect: She flinched when the door slammed reads backwards at speed; The door slammed. She flinched. reads in order.
• Dangling modifiers. Running for the ferry, the rain soaked her has the rain running.

Precision

• Concrete over general. A bird to a gull; food to cold chips. One precise noun beats an adjective stack.
• Strong verbs. Adverb plus weak verb (walked slowly) to one verb (trudged), when a better verb exists and fits the voice.
• Right word. Near-miss words (enormity for size, disinterested for uninterested) and words from the wrong era or world.
• Figurative language. Each metaphor comes from the POV character's world, fits the tone, and does not mix with the one beside it. Cut figures that explain what the plain sentence already showed.

Economy

• Redundancy. Nodded her head, shrugged his shoulders, stood up, sat down, thought to herself.
• Throat-clearing. She began to, started to, seemed to, managed to, unless the incompleteness matters.
• Stacked hedges. Almost, just, a little, somewhat, kind of. Keep them in dialogue where they are characterisation.
• Stage directions. Movement the reader does not need (crossing the room, turning to face) between two lines that matter.
• Double telling. An emotion named after the action already showed it. Cut the naming.

Do not cut for its own sake. A light edit trims only repetition and clutter; lush or maximal voices keep their length.

Rhythm

• Sentence length follows intent. Short for impact, long for flow or overwhelm. story prose . flags uniform spread; fix by intent, not by alternating lengths mechanically.
• Paragraph endings. The last words of a paragraph carry weight. End on the image or the turn, not on a trailing clause.
• Echoes. Repeated words within a few lines (the prose report lists them). Keep deliberate repetition.
• Sound. Accidental rhyme, alliteration, and tongue-twisters; the read-aloud pass catches these best.

POV and distance

• Filter words. She saw, heard, felt, noticed put a pane of glass between reader and scene. Remove them where the perceiving is not the point. See ../../voice-style/references/prose-checks.md.
• Head-hopping. Only the POV character's thoughts and feelings are known directly; others' show through behaviour.
• Knowledge slips. The POV character names things they could not know or would not notice.
• Tense and person. Consistent with story.md's tense and pov.

Voice

• Consistency with the Voice section of style-sheet.md. Distance, register, rhythm, and what the prose never does.
• Genericness. Stock phrases (a beat of silence, let out a breath she didn't know she was holding) replaced with the specific thing this character would notice. Add real tics to watch-words.
• Don't flatten. Fragments, dialect, run-ons, and odd syntax that are part of the voice stay. When in doubt, ask.

Character-voice differentiation

When story voices . reports two voices near-identical, or dialogue reads interchangeably, use these levers, one or two per character, drawn from their character file:

Test: cover the tags on a page of dialogue. The author should be able to tell who is speaking from the line alone for the main cast. After edits, rerun story voices . to confirm the fingerprints moved apart.