The Line-by-Line Edit

CambridgeEditors Line-by-Line Edit optimizes your manuscript’s power and style. Mindful of the particular purpose of each individual manuscript, our Line Editors carefully review structure, syntax, word choice, and flow. Editorial changes made to manuscripts are recorded using Microsoft Word’s Track Changes, which offers the additional capacity for editors to address marginal comments to authors. In these comments, the Line Editor may explain the rationale for a particular change, make concrete suggestions to improve clarity or precision, and identify difficulties in grasping the meaning of a section of text, thus calling an author’s attention to any ambiguous sections of the manuscript.

Throughout the Line-by-Line Edit, your editor will follow your lead. Your Line Editor will enact changes that are in keeping with your meaning and purpose and consistent with your voice and style. In the case of evidence-based manuscripts, your editor will demonstrate particular ways of strengthening the impact of figures, tables, and secondary sources cited in the document. Your Line Editor not only follows your lead, aiming to clarify your views and enhance your style, but also ensures that guidelines of your form of work are met.

Moreover, the Line-by-Line Edit encompasses our Proofread Service as well. Because it takes your work seriously and moves with care and thoroughness at every point, the Line-by-Line Edit is the most popular of all of CambridgeEditors Services. It is the favorite choice of authors at all levels of English expression.

 

Line Edits for Structure

For innumerable reasons, you may request or benefit from structural input on your manuscript. Sometimes, a slight change in structure can make a huge difference in readers’ appreciation and understanding of a work of writing. If you face a stumbling block in organizing a section of your text or the text as a whole, your CambridgeEditors Line Editor offers professional input to help you. Your editor might physically move blocks of text or suggest that you do so. At other times, your editor might offer you options from which to choose in organizing your manuscript.

If a natural logic for your argument does not propose itself to you, your editor can reorder paragraphs and sections in order to bring key themes and notions to the fore. Many manuscripts encounter this issue in at least a few spots. Those of you who are writing dissertations in certain fields may know that materials contained in the Methodology chapter must be correctly distinguished from those appropriate to the Analysis chapter. Making this distinction is not always easy. Your editor is available to address these problems.

CambridgeEditors Line Editors strive to ensure that each argument moves forward in a logical manner, while the main points are underscored throughout. Such a goal is often easy to achieve in a short essay; however, it is more difficult to attain when an author is writing a lengthier manuscript over many months or years. Short pieces, for their part, may go astray for different reasons, such as when the writer seeks to cover too much, at times under the constraint of a page or word limit, resulting in a document that touches on many subjects without delving sufficiently into any of them. When authors are stumped in these and other myriad ways, your Line Editor will bring expertise and consideration to bear in changing or suggesting changes to your work of writing.

CambridgeEditors knows that prose argumentation tends to have a natural flow, wherein the central point gives way to supportive description or facts as well as to analysis of these. This is as true in marketing as it is in storytelling and in academic work. Whatever the length of your document, the reader of a well-written prose argument will sense early on whether the author has something innovative or interesting to offer. To read on or not to read on: that is the question!

Whatever genre in which you are writing, you will want your overarching contribution to be highlighted and accessible. In genres germane to the creative writer, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, authors frequently make a request for the Line-by-Line Edit specifically because of its attentiveness to structure. Our creative Line Editors are equipped to help with flashback placement, creation of suspense, pacing of interludes between description and dialogue, and other elements of creative works. In the case of poetry, both typographical and melodic structure define the medium. When offering structural input for creative works, your Line Editor intervenes only where input is thought to be of potential benefit. Like all other aspects of the Line-by-Line Edit, suggested structural changes are always within your discretion to accept and adapt, or to bypass or ignore.

 

Line Edits for Flow

Your CambridgeEditors Line Editor smooths out areas of your text where your prose has gotten choppy. Transitions should clearly signal the natural unfolding of logic and accordingly spell out the connections between an author’s thoughts, connections that are sometimes obvious to the writer while not yet being entirely clear to the reader. Your Line Editor understands that, when a topic is complex, unfolding ideas are best connected clearly and mellifluously. In many instances, adding a transitional phrase at the beginning of a paragraph, or between the sentences within one, renders your work in a clearer and smoother form. Transitions, which echo the movement of the mind, should sound natural to the ear, and your editor will be attentive to this. On the other hand, if your editor encounters an overuse of stock or awkward transitional phrases, these will be adjusted to conform to your voice. Your Line Editor always remembers that varying long sentences with shorter, more pithy ones creates emphasis. Furthermore, your Line Editor will modify staged, forced transitions.

When addressing sentence structure, your Line Editor’s overarching goal, is twofold—to highlight the linkages between your thoughts and to help you render a manuscript that reads well. From the grammatical point of view, your Line Editor takes care to see that correct punctuation is used to fix issues such as run-on sentences, sentence fragments, and sentences in which noun and verb are not coordinated in keeping with standard English usage.

 

Line Edits for Diction

As an author composes a text, the right words hopefully come to mind. When they don’t, most authors keep going, knowing that they can go back over their work and change some words or expressions later on. However, that right word or phrase sometimes continues to elude even the most seasoned of writers. Remember, if your language is clear, so generally is your meaning; moreover, words carry the tone of the piece of writing. Your Line Editor will flag areas where writing is prone to generalities, vagueness, or ambiguity. In these instances, your Line Editor often provides an alternative, which you may choose to retain. If your editor is unclear on which word or phrasing best captures your meaning, you may be offered selections from which to choose in a marginal comment. If the connotation of your word choice seems to conflict with your overall argument or perspective, your editor will query the choice of wording in this instance. Whether you are a native English speaker or someone for whom English is a second language, you might like the sound of a particular word or phrase without being cognizant of associations that clash with your overall viewpoint. Your Line Editor recognizes these concerns and suggests alternatives in these instances, explaining why these may be more suitable choices.