There is more to an editing service than straight forward sentence-level editing. Indeed, in professional editing services, your editor may focus on broader issues such as the structure of your overall manuscript, the structure of your paragraphs, or your use of formatting.
However, as every professional editor knows, sentence-level editing is an important practice that cannot be overlooked. In fact, sentence-level editing is so important that for many users of services, this is the only area that they want contributions from the editor.
Given the essential nature of sentence-level editing, the purpose of this article is to highlight several of the issues that professional editors handle when they engage in this task.
1. Eliminate so-called “dead” verbs
Dead verbs, in contrast to strong verbs, add little to a sentence in terms of explaining the action that occurred.
The standard list of dead verbs includes the following: “was,” “is,” “are,” “were,” “am,” “has,” “have,” “had,” “be,” “been,” “make,” “run,” “ran,” “go,” “went,” and “gone,” along with the present continuous forms of these verbs (i.e., the verbs with “ing” at the end).
To communicate clear meaning, dead verbs always need to be coupled with more words. For this reason, the use of dead verbs is inherently going to lead to wordiness.
2. Avoid redundancy and wordiness
It is almost always the case that the writer’s first draft is not concise. For this reason, a key part of sentence-level editing involves checking through your draft and seeing if there are any redundant words that can be removed.
Tightening up your writing by avoiding redundancy and wordiness may be difficult, especially when you’re finding it complex to spot wordiness in the first place. For this reason, working with a professional editing service can be a quicker and more effective way to achieve this.
3. Change negative statements into positive statements
We should all be positive in life, and so too should writers always be positive in their writing. That is to say, writers should – wherever possible – avoid negative statements.
For example, the negative statement “I will not be available until July” can be rewritten into the positive statement “I will be available from July.”
4. Prune excessively long sentences
A good rule of thumb to follow is that sentences should be kept shorter than 15 words.
An important reason why shorter sentences are better is because, for the most part, readers find it challenging to parse the meaning of long sentences.
It is worth emphasizing again that this is just a rule of thumb – for this reason, it should not be applied too strictly. Occasionally, long sentences are acceptable, but too many of them can weigh a reader down.
5. Get used to paraphrasing
Even though in today’s market, paraphrasing services are available and are regularly sold separately to editing services, editors must also paraphrase sentences from time to time.
In particular, when engaging in sentence-level editing, editors should always paraphrase direct quotations, the only exception being when a direct quotation is expressly required (e.g., when critiquing a style of language or giving examples).
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