Point of view, tense, and voice
Almost nothing about point of view, tense, or voice is settled by a rule anyone publishes. What is settled is that an editor is supposed to protect these things rather than tidy them away, and one professional standard says so directly. These questions separate what an editor can check from what only the author can decide.
Whose story is this?
Nothing external answers this, and an editor who answers it confidently is guessing. What can be reported is where the manuscript itself has answered it. A book spends its pages on somebody, gives one character the decisions that matter, and ends when that character's situation resolves.
Where those three point at different people, the manuscript has not settled the question, and that is a finding worth having. It usually shows up as a chapter told from a character who never returns, or an ending that belongs to someone the middle forgot about.
Editors Canada places this work in structural editing, which it defines as assessing and shaping draft material to improve its organization and content, including clarifying plot or thematic elements.1 The report says what the pages are doing. Which character the book belongs to is a decision about what the author came to write, and no editor is in a position to make it for them.
Is the point of view consistent, and did I break it deliberately?
Consistency is checkable and intention is not, which is why this arrives as a query rather than a correction. An editor marks each place where the narration reports something the viewpoint character could not know, and asks whether the break was meant.
The Chicago Manual's own blog makes a general version of this point about fiction: knowing the style rules is what gives a writer the choice of when to follow them and when to break them.2 Deliberate breaks are common and some of them are the best pages in a book. An omniscient aside, a sudden move into another head at a turning point, or a narrator who admits to knowing more than they should are all choices rather than errors. What separates a choice from a slip is usually pattern: a break that happens once in a novel of unbroken close third reads differently from one that happens in every chapter.
The style sheet is where the answer goes once given, because copy editing includes checking mechanical consistency and producing that record.1 A break approved on page 40 should not be queried again on page 300.
Past tense or present, and why?
Both are in wide use and neither is a fault. No style manual, association standard, or publisher guideline we could find expresses a preference between them for fiction, and any editor presenting one as a rule is presenting a taste.
What an editor does check is that the choice holds. Present tense written by an author more accustomed to past tense tends to slip in flashbacks, in summary passages, and in sentences that state a general truth about a character. Those slips are mechanical and they are marked as slips.
The second thing worth checking is whether the tense is doing anything. Present tense narrows the distance between reader and character and closes off the retrospective voice that past tense allows. An author who wanted the retrospective voice and wrote in present tense has a mismatch, and it is one an editor can describe without recommending a rewrite.
First person or third?
The choice is about access rather than about style. First person gives the reader one consciousness and everything else at second hand. Third person, close or omniscient, buys access to more heads at the cost of the intimacy the first offers.
An editor sees the consequences of the choice more clearly than the choice itself. Manuscripts in first person that keep straining to report scenes the narrator did not witness are describing a book that wants third. Manuscripts in third that stay inside one head for three hundred pages are describing a book that might as well be first.
Neither observation is a recommendation. Both are findings about what the pages keep trying to do, and they are handed over as findings. The decision costs a rewrite in either direction, and it belongs to the person who has to do it.
Does this sound like me?
Editors Canada defines stylistic editing as editing to clarify meaning, ensure coherence and flow, and refine the language. Maintaining consistent tone and authorial voice is one of the tasks it lists under that heading.1 Preserving the author's voice is not a courtesy an editor extends. It sits inside the body of knowledge and practice the same organization publishes as its Professional Editorial Standards.3
That said, an author is a poor judge of whether a manuscript sounds like them, because they hear the voice they intended. What is checkable is internal: whether chapter one and chapter twenty sound like the same person wrote them, and whether the passages written under deadline differ from the rest.
An editor who returns a manuscript sounding more like the editor has done the job badly. Where a change alters voice rather than clarity, it should arrive as a query with a reason, not as a silent correction.
Does it sound like the last book I read?
Influence is normal and mostly invisible to the person under it. It shows up in sentence rhythm, in a favored piece of punctuation, in the way chapters open, and in tics such as a fondness for one-word paragraphs.
An editor can name the pattern without naming the source. A report that says the first person plural appears eleven times in eight pages, or that nine chapters open with weather, gives a writer something to look at. A comparison to another author does not.
Whether the resemblance matters is a separate question. Genres run on shared convention, and a crime novel that reads like other crime novels is meeting a reader's expectation rather than failing an originality test. What causes trouble is a borrowed voice that fits the borrowed book and not this one.
Am I writing the way I speak, and should I be?
Speech and prose diverge in ways that are easy to list. Spoken sentences repeat, trail off, and rely on tone to carry meaning that punctuation has to carry on the page. Written sentences have to survive without a speaker present.
The EFA describes line editors as working at the sentence and paragraph level, correcting errors while concentrating on improving the language and style of the text.4 Prose that came straight from speech is where that work concentrates: filler, false starts, and sentences whose meaning depended on being in the room.
Some of it should stay. A conversational register is a legitimate choice and it carries a great deal of memoir and popular nonfiction. The test is whether a sentence still works for a reader who cannot hear it, and reading aloud is how most authors find the ones that do not.
Is the humor working, and does it survive a second reading?
Nobody can answer the first half except a reader, and an editor is one reader with one sense of humor. What an honest report says is where this reader laughed and where a joke appeared to be intended and did not land, marked as one person's response rather than as a verdict.
The second half is more tractable. Jokes that depend on surprise weaken on rereading, and an editor is reading the manuscript slowly and more than once, which makes them an unusually harsh test of that kind of joke. A running gag that survives a fourth encounter is doing something a surprise cannot.
Two mechanical faults show up often. Jokes explained in the sentence after they land, and comic passages that repeat a construction the book has already used, are both fixable without touching what is funny.
Is a tense shift ever intentional, and how does an editor tell?
It can be, and an editor finds out by asking, which is why this arrives in the margin as a question. An editor cannot tell from the page whether a shift into present tense in a memory sequence was designed or was the writing running ahead of the writer.
Marked shifts are usually structural: a framing device, a dream, a document quoted inside the narrative, or a section that stands outside the book's own timeline. Unmarked shifts inside a continuous scene are usually accidents. That is a rule of thumb and not a rule, and the query goes in either way.
Once the author answers, the answer is recorded and applied. Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence, and the decisions an author makes about their own narration are recorded on the style sheet rather than argued with.
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/ ↩
- Editors Canada, Professional Editorial Standards, 2024 edition. https://www.editors.ca/professional-editorial-standards ↩
- Editorial Freelancers Association, Editorial Service Definitions. https://www.the-efa.org/editorial-services-definitions/ ↩