line-editor

Files (12)

• SKILL.md
• openai.yaml · agents/
• evals.json · evals/
• 01-farmhouse.md · evals/files/
• 02-flood.md · evals/files/
• 03-letter.md · evals/files/
• 04-saltmarsh-style-sheet.md · evals/files/
• 04-saltmarsh.md · evals/files/
• 05-visit.md · evals/files/
• 06-saint-agnes.md · evals/files/
• 07-funeral-style-sheet.md · evals/files/
• 07-funeral.md · evals/files/

SKILL.md (first lines)

# Line editor

Before reviewing, read and follow [the editorial contract](../references/editorial-contract.md) and [review conduct](../references/review-conduct.md). This skill adds what is specific to line editing.

## Establish the voice baseline

Read the whole passage in scope before drafting any note. If the scope is longer than a chapter, confirm it or work in sections, and say which sections you covered. If the passage is too short to show its norms, read the surrounding text for the baseline without commenting on it.

Describe the passage's norms in two or three sentences: sentence length and shape, register, period or setting, psychic distance, tense, and recurring devices such as fragments, lists, repetition, dialect, or unusual punctuation. When the narrator or POV changes, describe each voice separately. Note each character's dialogue norms where they differ.

Judge every candidate note against this baseline, not against generic workshop prose. A feature consistent with the baseline is style. Flag it only where it departs from the baseline or where the surrounding text shows it working against its own effect.

## Read for causes, not impressions

Every note names the reader effect and the cause that produces it. "The rhythm drags" is an impression; "the verb waits behind three prepositional phrases, so the action lands after the reader has lost the subject" is a note. Look for causes like these. They help find problems; they are not note labels.

- **Clarity:** ambiguous pronoun or referent; dangling or misplaced modifier; unclear blocking; a response shown before its stimulus; a sentence that needs rereading to parse.
- **Rhythm:** main verb delayed by stacked clauses; a weak word in the stress position at the end of a sentence or paragraph; a run of same-shaped sentences where the baseline varies; accidental rhyme or meter; syntax whose pace fights the pace of the moment.
- **Diction:** a word outside the narrator's or POV character's register; a near-miss synonym; abstraction where the baseline is concrete; anachronism; unintended cliché.
- **Imagery:** mixed or competing figures; a figure whose connotations fight the tone; stacked figures that dilute each other; sensory detail out of perceptual order.
- **Repetition:** an unintended echo of a distinctive word or sound within a short span; a structural tic, such as every paragraph opening the same way; information the reader already has. Patterned repetition, such as anaphora or refrain, is style.
- **Distance and POV:** an unmotivated shift in psychic distance; filter verbs holding the reader outside a moment the passage otherwise inhabits; knowledge the POV character couldn't have; tense slips.
- **Dialogue:** tags or adverbs explaining what the line already shows; characters telling each other what both know; interchangeable voices; beats that break a line's timing.

## Avoid default line-edit habits

- Don't flag adverbs, passive voice, "was," filter verbs, or telling by rule. Flag them only when you can name their cost to the reader in this passage.
- Don't nudge the prose toward neutral workshop style or toward more ornament. "More vivid" is not a direction.
- Don't treat shorter as better. Say what a cut would gain.
- Don't smooth roughness the baseline shows is deliberate.
- Don't hedge notes.

## Give directions, not rewrites

A revision direction names an operation on the existing text: cut these words, move this clause, split or join sentences, resolve a referent, replace an abstraction with the concrete thing it stands for. Quote the words to cut or move. Don't supply replacement words, phrases, or sentences unless the author asks for them. When asked, offer one or two options in the baseline voice within the note, as proposals; changing the manuscript itself still needs a separate request.

## Label each note

- **Likely issue:** a local craft problem.
- **Continuity:** a conflict with material in scope or a settled author decision, identified without inventing canon.
- **Taste:** a preference the author may reasonably decline. When a departure from the baseline may be deliberate, use Taste and ask whether it is intended.
- **Protect:** a passage whose effect revision could easily lose. Name the cause of the effect, as with any other note; without it, the note is praise, not editing.

Put the notes with the largest reader effect first. For example:

> **[Line]** Likely issue: "Nan handed her mother the knife, and she flinched." The reader can't tell who flinched, and the flinch is the point of the moment. Resolve the second "she."

> **[Line]** Protect: "Keys. Wallet. The cat's dish, still full." The list gives objects and no feelings, so the shock registers through what she can't stop noticing. Added interiority here would explain it away.

## Check against author decisions

After drafting notes, and not before, check them against any style sheet, story-bible entries, or author notes on voice, dialect, spelling, or invented terms that the author supplied or the project keeps. Drafting first keeps the read of the prose independent of what the author intended. For a large story bible, use [story-bible](../story-bible/SKILL.md) to assemble a context packet for the passage rather than reading the whole bible.

- Drop notes that contradict a settled decision.
- If a decision seems to work against its own effect in this passage, keep the note as Taste and cite the decision.
- Flag passages that depart from a settled decision as Continuity, citing the decision.

## Deliver the feedback

Deliver as [review conduct](../references/review-conduct.md) describes. Start each note with bold `[Line]` and its label, as in the examples.

Each note gives a short exact quote, the reader effect and its cause, and an optional direction. Keep one materially distinct observation per note. For a recurring pattern, note one or two representative instances and list the other locations in the summary. Flag structural concerns for a developmental pass in a line; don't expand into an editorial letter.

Mechanical errors such as typos and doubled words are outside a line edit. List them with locations in the summary instead of commenting on each, unless the author also asks for a copyedit.

In the closing summary, also include the voice baseline, recurring patterns, and mechanical errors.

From atrnh/skills, MIT.

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