Person who performs an edit that is heavier than a typical copyedit and who considers a book's voice, tone and phrasing. Fiction line editing considers the story's pacing, character development, handling of details and vocabulary of the period and place where the novel is set and the naturalness and effectiveness of dialogue. A line editor also focuses on correcting errors in grammar, punctuation and writing style.
The editor responsible for all textual issues not in the purview of the copy editor. The line editor reads the text for sense, clarity, tone, flow, logic, quality of expression, redundancy, good order, conciseness, and consistency, covering some of the same ground as the copy editor but with a view to the text as a whole (as opposed to the copy editor, whose focus tends to be on individual words and sentences). The line editor should spot missing elements of the text that need to be there for reader comprehension, a statement made on page 196 that seems to contradict one made on page 17, reasoning that doesn't quite convince, and scenes that don't work-making fixes, suggesting fixes, or referring problems to the author for fixes. The copy editor needs to know house style and the rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation, but the line editor needs to understand what the author is trying to accomplish and be able to recognize when he or she fails to accomplish it.
A line editor is a text editor computer program that is oriented around lines. Now considered extremely old-fashioned, they stem from the days when a computer operator would be sitting in front of a teletype (essentially a printer with a keyboard), so there was no screen and no way to move a cursor around a document.
