Writing and editing are related but distinct jobs, like trimming your nails and cutting your hair. You wouldn’t want to do both at once, and it’s best to leave the second to someone with relevant experience and a different perspective.
In other words, you’re not supposed to have gotten every little thing right. And you haven’t. Trust me on this.
When you’ve lived with your draft from its first incarnation through all the big revisions and little tweaks that have gotten it within squinting distance of the book it can be, you’ve also been living for too long with some typos and grammatical errors. It’s time for a fresh pair of eyes. If developmental editing helped you see the forest for the trees, copyeditors are here to spot the odd candy wrapper caught in the undergrowth.
Types of Copyediting
Copyediting is responsive to the text. Its goal is typically to bring the manuscript to a publishable state, but its way of doing so is necessarily different for each project. And so we subdivide. You might have heard of line editing, or light copyediting; you might have heard some folks refer to copyediting as proofreading.
Those (and their cousins) are all useful categories for broader conversations, but they become a bit pedantic when the important question is “What does this manuscript need before we can turn it into a book?” Production editors know the depth of editing they’re looking for when they offer contracts to freelance copyeditors like me. When I work with individual clients, a quick conversation right off the bat accomplishes the same thing.
Which brings us back to the usefulness of categories for broader conversations. Here’s how I break things down; please take it as a basis for a conversation about your manuscript. For an exhausting exhaustive treatment of how I view different levels of editing, see my blog post on the subject.
Line Editing
Line editing looks at the purpose and mechanics of each sentence in your manuscript and asks whether it’s contributing what it should. If not, a line editor suggests options. These range from little tweaks, like bringing one phrase into agreement with another, to major changes like consolidating paragraphs or splitting them up. They also might include some suggested rewrites of sentences or entire passages.
Importantly, line editors typically have the freedom to commit these changes directly, and to track them for the author’s review. This is just a matter of efficiency: Explaining every decision behind an especially deep edit takes a lot more time for everyone than simply making those changes and asking whether the author agrees.
Line editors also perform deep fact-checking, which sometimes has implications for a manuscript’s structure or plot.
Because a line edit typically asks so much of the author in return, it never includes final copyediting. No point in painting the house before the siding’s all up.
Heavy Copyediting
When a manuscript is structurally complete–when a production editor or author is comfortable with its construction and pace–it might benefit from a heavy copyedit rather than a line edit.
Think of heavy copyediting as line editing with its center of gravity shifted toward final publication. You won’t see any summary rewriting or reorganization; instead, the editor will make the minimum number of changes necessary to render things grammatically clear and consistent with your voice. And leave queries. Lots of queries. If you answer those with care, you might end up very close to a finished product…but it’s still typically a good idea to have someone look at the results. You’ll still get serious fact-checking.
Light Copyediting
After any round of line editing, and often after heavy copyediting, you’ll want a final round of light copyediting. Here, the editor will take your manuscript on its own terms and look strictly for errors in spelling, grammar, and internal consistency. Errors documented in the project’s preferred style guide can still be changed directly for your review, but everything else is queried. The edits shouldn’t require much rewriting, if any, and the results should be ready for publication.