Editing: Claire Kehrwald Cook's Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing

Line by Line was something of an impulse read for me, as I saw it in the writing section of the small library from which I’d borrowed Artful Sentences. Although it is subtitled “How to Edit Your Own Writing” and I expect my own professional needs for the task to be limited over the next year or so, I figured that its content would similarly apply in going over others’ writing. In this, I was not disappointed. As far as I can tell, nothing in the text need be limited to that context.

The chapters follow a repeated format in which a topic is introduced in general terms, the logic and differing opinions of experts are stated, examples are shown, and the errors discussed along with ways of correcting them, either while maintaining the general structure and feel of the existing sentence (which tends to more strongly highlight the immediate topic) or by a more thorough rewrite. It’s simple; it’s well-quantized, supporting the reading of small segments as time allows; it’s fun. Well, the last only really applies if you enjoy the game, challenge, exercise of fixing prose before Cook gives her solutions. Within the body of the book, this is the aspect I found to be most engaging.

The first of five chapters, “Loose, Baggy Sentences” covers Cook’s first step in editing: trimming down prose. The culprits identified are bulky or lifeless nouns, weak verbs (thoughtless usage of the passive voice is prominently discussed here), strings of prepositional phrases, and empty or redundant tracts (“In this paper I will discuss…”). Key methods of improvement introduced are the proper selection of nouns, which can reduce the need for modifiers; the replacement of phrases and clauses with pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs; and rearranging sentences to allow livelier verbs.

The next three chapters concern the relations between parts of a sentence. First comes “Faulty Connections,” which heavily focuses on the correct placement of modifiers, but makes space at the end for subject-verb connections, removing situational ambiguousness caused by words with different forms, and connecting objects to verbs. “Ill-matched Partners” deals heavily with parallelism (where it should appear, and where it should not), pairs, and series. It is in this chapter that the conjunctions and and or make their greatest appearances, and weightier and more rigid structures like both … and. The last of the chapters on tying pieces together is “Mismanaged Numbers and References.” Getting subject and verb to agree in number and gender dominates, but in addition to discussing the likes of none, each, and collective nouns (section, caucus, etc.) and avoiding he for a person of indeterminate gender (or they for an individual), Cook offers guidance on how to deal with larger problems like missing or difficult to identify antecedents of pronouns.
“Problems with Punctuation” is the final chapter, and the one I found, oddly, both most concrete and most subtle. Terminal punctuation is scarcely mentioned, and where it is it is principally brought up in relation to quotations or semicolons. But this is fine. I trust that instinct alone will largely carry most of us where that is concerned. Semicolons, colons, dashes, and parentheses get a section, but apart from indicating that parentheses result in a stronger break from the rest of the sentence than do dashes, it had little to offer that seemed other than trivial. No, the high point of the chapter was the section on commas. Commas, I find, are the most difficult to judge, both because they are used for so many purposes and because in many cases they are optional. While at times saying little more than “read it and see what sounds right” or “it depends on what you want to emphasize,” the statement of the definite cases, both those requiring and those prohibiting comma use, and how to identify when a comma is optional or ambiguously needed—and how to decide whether to use one or not when those cases arise—is at least useful for clarifying thinking. One point in the chapter that caught me off guard was the strong endorsement of the serial (or Oxford) comma; it came in the “Helpful Commas” rather than the “Discretionary Commas” subsection and included the mere observations that most newspapers and magazines do not use it (following a trend of reducing punctuation generally) and that “if the serial comma were obligatory, [some] sequences could not be misconstrued.” I have no problem with this, as I have been for years a proponent of the serial comma; I just would have expected it to appear not there, but in Appendix B, “A Glossary of Questionable Usage,” which dealt with things such as this on which there is more disagreement. But perhaps I shouldn’t have, since earlier Cook gave a stronger admonition against splitting infinitives than I’ve seen in years.

The appendices are nice on their own. The first is a 20-page introduction to the parts of speech and how they are put together to form sentences. As either an introduction or quick refresher on English grammar, it does pretty well, and it doesn’t hurt to read it before the chapters. After all, even if you don’t need it, it goes by quickly. The second appendix, mentioned above, was one of my favorite sections of the whole book. Much of the material wasn’t new to me, where usage was concerned, but the commentary on the divisions was often interesting and enlightening. Similarly, due to the date of publication—1985—and fact that there’s only the one edition, it gives a look into what pet peeves and hobbyhorses have stuck around in the last thirty years, and which haven’t. Despite ongoing predictions of its demise, whom doesn’t seem to have left the consciousness of the most picky, or even been relegated to following prepositions and nothing else. Likewise, it appears that at least two decades after Line by Line’s publication, the status of hopefully as a sentence adverb was still, roughly, existing as something everyone does, something many experts have had to accept, something the die-hards nevertheless condemn. From my personal experience, though, this book was the first time I’d heard that relationship should not be used as the noun form of relate, as opposed to relation; true, there would have been objections in some contexts, such as using relationship for cousins, parents, siblings, and such, or for international relations, but those are edge cases. But probably the greatest pure fun I got out of anything in the book was thinking about an example used in the entry on respective and respectively:

Even when a sentence relates two pairs or series the proper combinations may be obvious without respective or respectively. The modifiers are not misused in the following sentences, but they hardly seem necessary: John, Bill, and Robert are married, respectively, to Judy, Beth, and Amy.

Change out the names and say that the sentence comes from a story on this site, and I wouldn’t be entirely sure of even the number of marriages involved without the modifier!

Overall, Line by Line is a perfectly respectable resource, covering most situations that will come up, going by quickly and with easy to follow style, and containing interesting and useful applied exercises within the flow of the regular text; but it does not strike me as an outstanding one. It’s available for well under $10, but with some of its competition free and available online (and searchable!)—from the first edition of Strunk and White (okay, it's just Strunk) to the Grammar Girl website and more in between—you may just do better with an alternative than a paid-for hard copy of an approximately replacement level book which hasn’t been updated in three decades.