Editing is an important part of the publishing process. A good editor does more than fix typos. An editor can suggest improvements to your pacing and rhythm, help you find continuity errors, make sure your characters’ names are spelled correctly, fact-check, and more.
There are several different kinds of editors, and several different ways to approach editing. If you’re new to writing, you might have questions about the different types of editing. Here’s what you need to know.
Line Editing
Line editing is sometimes known as stylistic editing, and it's often bundled up with copy editing. It works at a more detailed level than developmental editing. If developmental editing looks at structure and the overall arc of story and character, line editing gets into the text in a much more engaged way.
You would expect an editor to line edit once the story is otherwise in place. Broadly speaking, it's working: the chapters are in the right order, the characters are doing things that make sense, the pacing is good and the plot holds together. The shape of your book is there. But not every sentence may be working as well as it could. Some things may be phrased awkwardly, and dialogue doesn't always ring true. Just think of Harrison Ford's famous riposte to George Lucas, which went along the lines of: "George! You can type this sh*t, but you sure can't say it!"
Line editing also goes into sentence construction, which isn't just a matter of grammar. Sometimes there are simply too many words, and you would get more impact from fewer. Many of us writers love words, but occasionally some of us sound as though we've swallowed a thesaurus.
In many cases, a line editor can step in and help bring out the meaning of what you're trying to say. They might offer better, or at least alternative, word choices, or suggest where to pare things back or where to avoid cliché. They might point out where a character wouldn't be expected to say something in the way it's being said. Perhaps it's the wrong background for that voice, or perhaps it's dialogue that works on the page but not out of someone's mouth.
A good line editor can help make your book sing.
Copy Editing
Copy editing is an even more granular level of editing than line editing. This is where the editor goes through a document to make sure it is internally consistent and that its style is the same throughout. Are you going to spell it "OK", "okay" or "O.K."? Are you going to use US or British English? Where do you use capitals?
It's rather like imposing a style guide, which, as often as not, is one the author has implicitly created themselves. Nobody should have told e. e. cummings to use capitals; but if a capital had somehow slipped into his work, a copy editor would probably have pulled it out.
Copy editing will also pull you up on grammar, punctuation and spelling. Grammar in reported speech or dialogue is a separate matter from grammar in the body of the text. Characters do not always speak grammatically, and if you're writing in the first person and that narrator isn't grammatical, that is fine and dandy. It's part of the work. But a degree of consistency helps, because it keeps the experience of reading immersive. There is a single voice there rather than a pastiche. That's why referring back to the internal logic of the writing is another important feature of copy editing.
Proofreading
Proofreading comes very late in the editorial process. If you have a contract from a publisher, you can reasonably expect them to proofread, and you might reasonably expect them to copy edit as well.
If you are self-publishing, proofreading is another layer of polish, and it separates a professional approach to self-publication from a rather more slapdash one. It's lovely to get a book out there, but errors do put people off. They take readers out of the experience if you're writing fiction, and if you're writing non-fiction, too many errors, including typos detract from your credibility.
Of course, some very respected publications are famous for their typos, not least the Guardian, which was long known to its readers and admirers as the "Grauniad", simply because proofreading was not always its best feature. But if you're self-publishing, you might want to spend money at a late stage, once everything else is in place, on a proofreader.