Line-Editing Tips for Confident Prose

After you've wrestled with the plot, character arcs, and structure of your story, it’s time to zoom in. This is the realm of line editing, where you polish your manuscript sentence by sentence. While developmental editing is about the architectural blueprint of your novel, line editing is about the interior design. It’s what makes the reader’s experience immersive and seamless.

Confident prose is direct, clear, and trusts the reader to understand. It doesn’t hedge with weak words or over-explain its own meaning. It creates a direct line between the story and the reader's mind, building immersion and maintaining pace. Weak prose, on the other hand, often apologizes for itself, creating distance and pulling the reader out of the story.

This guide offers practical, actionable techniques you can apply to your own manuscript to strengthen your prose and write with confidence.

What You’ll Learn

In this guide, we'll cover how to:

• Cut redundant and hesitant phrasing
• Eliminate filtering words that distance your reader
• Replace weak verb + adverb combinations with stronger verbs
• Avoid unnecessary passive voice
• Trim qualifiers and overwriting
• Write prose that feels clear, direct, and confident

1. Cut Redundant Words

Redundancy clutters prose and slows reading. It’s a habit of speech that creeps into writing. A focused pass to eliminate unnecessary words can immediately make your writing feel more direct and energetic.

• Implied Body Parts: Actions often imply the body part involved.

  • Before: She nodded her head in agreement.
  • After: She nodded in agreement.
  • Before: He shrugged his shoulders and left.
  • After: He shrugged and left.

• "Started to" or "Began to": In most cases, you can show the action happening directly.

  • Before: He began to run down the street.
  • After: He ran down the street.
  • The main exception is when the action is interrupted. For example: "She started to open the door, but a noise from behind stopped her."

• Common Redundant Phrases: These phrases add words but not meaning.

  • "in order to" → "to"
  • "each and every" → "every" or "each"
  • "first and foremost" → "first"
  • "various different" → "various" or "different"
  • "past history" → "history"
  • "end result" → "result"
  • "future plans" → "plans"
  • "in fact" → simply remove

2. Eliminate Filtering Words

Filtering words place a layer between the reader and the character's direct experience. They report on the character's senses or thoughts instead of letting the reader experience them.

Common filters include: saw, heard, felt, realized, noticed, wondered.

By removing them, you place the reader directly into the character's point of view, creating an immediate and immersive experience.

• Weak: She saw the knife glinting on the table.

• Strong: The knife glinted on the table.

• Weak: He felt his heart racing.

• Strong: His heart raced.

• Weak: She noticed a stain on his collar.

• Strong: A stain marked his collar.

There are times when filtering words are useful, such as when establishing the POV at the beginning of a scene or when the character's uncertainty is the focus ("She wondered if he was telling the truth"). But used too often and they weaken your prose.

3. Replace Weak Verb + Adverb Combinations

Strong verbs are the engines of confident prose. They carry specific, vivid meaning without needing help from adverbs. Over-reliance on adverbs can be a sign that the verb isn't doing its job.

• "walked quickly" → "hurried," "rushed," "strode"
• "said loudly" → "shouted," "yelled," "bellowed"
• "looked closely" → "peered," "stared," "examined"
• "ate quickly" → "devoured," "wolfed," "scarfed"
• "held tightly" → "clutched," "grasped," "gripped"

This doesn't mean all adverbs are bad. They can be effective when they modify or contradict the verb in an interesting way, such as "he smiled sadly" or "she whispered fiercely."

When it comes to dialogue tags, "said" is often your best choice. It’s invisible to the reader and keeps the focus on the dialogue itself. Overusing elaborate tags ("he opined," "she exclaimed") can be distracting.

Adverb replacement is one of the quickest ways to improve your prose. Here's a deeper analysis for those wanting to know more.

4. Kill Passive Voice (Most of the Time)

Active voice is direct and clear; the subject of the sentence performs the action. In passive voice, the subject is acted upon. This construction can make prose feel convoluted and slow. For example:

• Passive: The letter was delivered by the mailman at noon.

• Active: The mailman delivered the letter at noon.

• Passive: The gun was found under the bed.

• Active: Police found the gun under the bed.

A quick way to identify passive voice is the "by zombies" test. If you can add "by zombies" after the verb, the sentence is likely passive. For example, "The door was opened (by zombies)."

However, passive voice has its uses:

• When the actor is unknown: "The window had been shattered." This creates mystery.
• To deliberately deflect responsibility: "Mistakes were made."
• To vary sentence rhythm in a long paragraph of active sentences.

We've written extensively about active and passive voice so we won't go further in this article, but here's the resource if you'd like to keep reading.

5. Trim Unnecessary Qualifiers

Qualifiers are words that soften or hedge your statements. They weaken your descriptions by telling the reader not to fully trust the assertion.

Common qualifiers include: very, really, just, quite, somewhat, almost, rather, sort of, kind of, a bit, fairly, pretty (as in "pretty good").

• Weak: She was rather angry about the situation.

• Strong: She was angry about the situation. (Or better yet, show her anger through action: "She slammed the drawer shut.")

• Weak: The weather was just cold enough for a sweater.

• Strong: The weather was cold enough for a sweater.

• Weak: His comment sounded a bit curt.

• Strong: His comment was curt.

In almost all instances, removing the qualifier improves the writing. A reader doesn't need to know if the soup was somewhat spicy, sort of spicy, or fairly spicy. Unless critical to the plot, saying the soup was spicy is sufficient.

The exception is in dialogue or first-person narration. A character who says, "I'm sort of worried about this," sounds authentic. Use these words intentionally to build character voice, not as a default in your narrative prose.

6. Watch for Overwriting

Overwriting, or "purple prose," happens when language becomes so elaborate that it obscures meaning. It often stems from an attempt to sound "literary," but it ends up distracting the reader.

Strive for clarity and precision. One sharp, specific image is more powerful than three vague, flowery ones.

• Overwritten: The crimson sun descended slowly toward the darkening horizon, painting the sky in a panoply of amber and golden hues.
• Concise: The sunset painted the sky gold.

You don’t need to describe every single detail of a room or an outfit. Focus on the details that matter for the character and the story, and let your readers' imagination do the rest. Speaking of readers...

7. Trust Your Reader

This principle underlies all others. Confident prose trusts readers to be intelligent. You don't need to over-explain your metaphors or tell the reader how a character feels after you've already shown it through their actions.

Avoid "As you know, Bob" dialogue, where characters tell each other things they already know for the sole purpose of informing the reader. Find more organic ways to deliver exposition.

Show something once, make it clear, and then move on. Your reader will keep up.

Conclusion

Line editing is where you elevate your manuscript's voice from amateur to professional. Confident prose is a result of deliberate choices; choosing the stronger verb, cutting the unnecessary word, and trusting the reader to engage with the story. By making a focused pass for these line-level issues, you can dramatically improve the clarity, pacing, and immersive quality of your novel.

And if you want to identify weak prose patterns across your entire manuscript, Inkshift's can help. We provide structured, editorial writing critiques that give you specific, actionable suggestions for strengthening your narrative voice. Good luck!