Dialogue, dialect, and description
Dialogue and description are where a manuscript's habits show most plainly, and where an editor has to be most careful about the difference between a fault and a choice. Two of the questions below have published guidance behind them, from the Chicago Manual of Style and its editors. The rest are answered by describing what an editor can check and what stays with the author.
Is my dialogue doing work, or is it filling pages?
A line of dialogue can carry information, change a relationship, reveal something about the speaker, or move a scene along. Lines that do none of those are usually there because two characters are in a room and something has to happen.
The check is mechanical enough to apply evenly. Each exchange gets one line of summary describing what is different afterward, and the exchanges that produce a blank line are the candidates. Greetings, arrivals, and the business of getting characters into position produce most of them.
Not all of it should go. Dialogue that does nothing but establish rhythm or comfort has a real function in a long book, and cutting every line of it produces prose that never lets the reader rest. What an editor supplies is the list, with the summaries attached, so the author can see how much of the book is in that category before deciding.
Have I described this character twice?
Repeated description is one of the few things in fiction that can be verified rather than judged. Physical descriptions, introductions, and the details a book chooses for each character are trackable across a manuscript, and copy editing covers checking mechanical consistency and building the style sheet that records it.1
Repeated description usually means the manuscript was written out of order or revised in pieces. A character is introduced in chapter two, introduced again in chapter nine for readers who arrived late, and both introductions survive because the author never read the two chapters together.
The related fault is contradiction rather than repetition. The scar moves from the left hand to the right, the eyes change color, and a character described as tall stands beside someone taller than expected. Both are found the same way, and both come back as queries with page numbers attached.
Am I telling the reader what I already showed them?
Restatement is easy to find because it clusters. It appears at the end of scenes, where a paragraph explains the exchange the reader has just watched. It appears again at the start of chapters, in a summary of something the reader finished ten pages ago.
An editor marks these as duplication rather than as a technique failure. The finding is that two passages carry the same information, and the second one arrives after the reader already has it. Which passage goes is a question about how much the author trusts the first one.
Some readers need the restatement and some are irritated by it, which is why the choice belongs to the author rather than to the editor. What is not defensible is keeping both without deciding, because that is not a choice, it is an accident that survived.
Should dialect be spelled phonetically or handled another way?
No style manual settles this. What the Chicago Manual's own editors say about fiction generally is that knowing the style rules is what gives a writer the choice of when to follow them and when to break them.2 Phonetic spelling is a break, and the case for making it deliberately is stronger than the case for either default.
The practical costs are known. Heavy phonetic spelling slows reading, applies unevenly across a cast, and marks some characters as deviating from a standard that other characters are allowed to represent. The alternatives are syntax, word choice, rhythm, and what a character notices, none of which respell anything.
Whichever system a book uses, it has to be one system. An editor records the spellings, the apostrophes, and the contractions on a style sheet and applies them evenly, which is copy editing work rather than a view about the writing.1
Should foreign words be italicized?
Chicago's answer is that italics are not automatic. The stated purpose of italicizing a non-English word in English text is to keep it from being read as an unfamiliar English word or a typographical error. The second purpose is to signal a switch to another convention of spelling.3 Where neither applies, the italics are optional.
The same source lists what changes the answer: how often the word appears, how familiar it is to the expected reader, and who is speaking. Words spoken by a character for whom they are ordinary vocabulary are rarely italicized.3 Writing on the Chicago Manual's blog, Russell Harper puts the fiction case more strongly. He argues that italics can make a language feel mannered or inauthentic, and that they compete with italics used for emphasis.4
What an editor needs is the decision, once, in either direction. After that it is a consistency job.
Should profanity be left as written?
Yes, unless the author says otherwise, and an editor should be asking rather than assuming. Profanity is a register choice, and softening it silently changes a character.
The questions worth settling in advance are narrower than the general one. Three of them can be settled before the pass starts. Is obscenity spelled out or partly masked, is the same word spelled the same way throughout, and does one character swear more than the manuscript intends?
The one case where an editor should raise it unprompted is a mismatch with a stated market. An author writing for a series line with published content standards may be working against a rule they have not read. Pointing at that rule is a different act from objecting to the words.
A character's grammar changes in one scene. Is that the character or the typing?
Only the author knows, so it comes back as a query with both passages quoted. The editor's job at that point is to make the choice easy to see rather than to decide it.
Deliberate shifts have a reason visible in the scene. A character who is frightened, drunk, lying, speaking to a superior, or reverting to a first language under pressure will speak differently, and the surrounding pages usually support the reading. Shifts with no such reason, appearing in a scene written at a different time from its neighbors, are more often the writing than the character.
Once answered, the answer is written down. That is what a style sheet is for, and it is why a character list is worth more than it costs.1
Is a fragment deliberate, and how does an editor know?
Pattern and position answer it most of the time, and asking settles the rest. A manuscript that uses fragments throughout, in a voice built around them, is not making an error on page 12.
The Chicago Manual's editors point out that fiction runs on choices that would be inconsistencies elsewhere. They give a small example of the kind that is not a choice: one character asking for ten dollars while another says they are ten dollars short, in figures.2 The distinction being drawn is between a system a writer is running and a slip inside it.
An editor who cannot tell asks once and then applies the answer. Querying the same fragment style forty times is a failure of the editor's own record-keeping rather than diligence.
Should repetition be kept for effect?
Repetition works when a reader can tell it is on purpose, which usually means it is close enough together to register or exact enough to be recognized. Repetition that arrives forty pages apart, with a word changed, reads as an author who forgot.
An editor reports both kinds separately. Intentional-looking repetition is flagged with a note asking whether it should be preserved through the copyedit, because the alternative is having it standardized away by a later pass.
Accidental repetition is more common and more easily fixed. A word used three times in a paragraph, a construction opening six consecutive sentences, or a favorite adjective appearing ninety times in a novel are all countable. A count is more persuasive than an opinion. Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence.
References
- Editors Canada, Definitions of Editorial Skills, June 2019. https://editors.ca/hire-an-editor/skills/ ↩
- Carol Saller, Advice for Fiction Writers (and Editors), Chicago-Style, CMOS Shop Talk, University of Chicago Press, December 13, 2022. https://cmosshoptalk.com/2022/12/13/advice-for-fiction-writers-and-editors-chicago-style/ ↩
- The Chicago Manual of Style Online, Q&A: Italics and Quotation Marks, on non-English words. University of Chicago Press. https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/ItalicsandQuotationMarks/faq0001.html ↩
- Russell Harper, Italics for Non-English Words in Fiction, CMOS Shop Talk, University of Chicago Press, March 17, 2020. https://cmosshoptalk.com/2020/03/17/italics-for-non-english-words-in-fiction/ ↩