I talk a lot about the importance of structure and about making your large-scale, 10,000-foot revisions before you dig into sentence-level changes. But there is also something to be said for having a few easy, concrete ways to improve the actual prose in your book.
So today I want to talk specifically about sentence-level editing: how to dig into the wording of your manuscript and come out with stronger, more intentional prose.
I realized recently that, in more than 150 episodes of the Page & Podium Podcast, I had somehow never devoted an entire episode to this topic. That felt wild to me, because I have been giving out some of these tips for at least fifteen years. They are the kinds of things writers can use as concrete guideposts when they finally reach the stage where they are ready to think carefully about voice, wording, and how their sentences actually sound.
Before we get to those tips, though, I need to give you the warning I always give writers at this stage: do not start sentence-level editing until you have finished your structural revision.
And I mean that at every level. The structure of the full book should be settled first. Then the structure of the chapters. If you have subsections within those chapters, those should be settled too.
Only then do I want you worrying about individual sentences.
Do Not Start Sentence-Level Editing Too Early
There are a couple of reasons I am so adamant about this.
The first is practical. If you start polishing individual sentences before you have finished revising the larger manuscript, you may spend a great deal of time perfecting material that does not even make it into the finished book.
That is simply part of revision.
Once you finish a full draft, I recommend reading through the entire manuscript and creating what is called a reverse outline. We have a full walkthrough of how to start revising your book, including how to use that reverse outline to step back and see what is actually on the page.
When you do that larger evaluation, you may discover that scenes need to move. A chapter may need to split into two chapters, or two chapters may need to become one. If you are writing general or prescriptive nonfiction, you may realize that some of your ideas are appearing in the wrong order or that the argument itself needs to be rearranged.
Those are not unusual discoveries. They are part of taking a first draft and turning it into a book.
The problem is that new authors especially often feel an urge to finish a chapter and immediately go back into it to play with the wording. I completely understand why. There is something emotionally rewarding about polishing a chunk of work you have just completed and making it feel finished.
But it is not actually finished yet.
When we skip the part where we finish the whole draft and assess it from the 10,000-foot view, we lose the chance to understand what the manuscript will feel like as a whole for the reader. Starting from structure at the book level, then moving to chapter structure, then subsections, and finally words and sentences gives you much more freedom to make meaningful decisions before you get stuck in the weeds.
That sequence is also why revision and editing really are different stages. Revision looks at the bones of the manuscript; editing starts getting much closer to the surface.
If your memoir draft poured out quickly and you are now staring at it wondering what comes next, our recent piece on how to revise your memoir after the first draft goes through this same top-down process in more detail.
Editing Too Early Can Also Stop You From Finishing
There is a second reason I want writers to wait before starting sentence-level editing, and this one has more to do with psychology.
When we begin working at the sentence level, we start looking very closely. We may be evaluating one word at a time. We might be looking for a particular grammatical construction, an -ing word, a conjunction, or whether one verb is stronger than another.
Once the brain starts working at that scale, perfectionism often starts creeping in.
That makes sense. If you are scrutinizing every word, your brain can very easily begin telling you that every word has to be right before you are allowed to move forward.
If you write one chapter and then polish it at the line level before drafting the next one, you have now set a standard that says your first draft is supposed to look polished all the way through. That is an exhausting standard to maintain, and I have watched it derail writers over and over again.
Waiting until you have finished the draft forces you to build some tolerance for imperfection. You write a rough sentence and leave it. You know it is not quite right, but you keep moving because you need to get the rest of the book onto the page.
That discomfort is actually useful.
We have talked before about how perfectionism can feed writer’s block and make writers feel as though every writing session has to produce polished work. But one of the most important things you can learn during drafting is that your art does not have to be perfect while you are creating it.
Eventually, you will need to let the finished book go too.
I do not mean that you should accept a sloppy book. Quite the opposite. I want your book to be excellent. But every piece of human-created art contains imperfections because it came from a human being.
And your reader is not going to agree with every choice you make anyway.
For a book to be truly “perfect,” every reader would have to agree with your premise, your structure, every example, every sentence, and every individual word. That is neither possible nor desirable. Readers do not want books that simply reflect their own thoughts back at them.
Developing some capacity to tolerate imperfection is part of finishing a book at all.
Once the larger revision is complete and the structure is settled, though, you can finally have some fun with the sentences.
Here are three places I recommend starting.
Sentence-Level Editing Tip #1: Look for Lists
The first thing I want you to search for is the word and.
I have been giving this advice for probably fifteen years, but it has become even more useful in the age of AI because AI-generated writing has made lists of near-synonyms incredibly common.
What we are looking for are lists of words, especially adjectives.
When we are drafting, we are often thinking as we write. That is one of the reasons I believe the actual act of writing matters so much. Choosing the words is part of figuring out what you think. Even if you tell an AI tool your ideas first, you have skipped some of the thinking that happens during the process of actually choosing how to say them.
One place you can see that thinking happening on the page is in lists.
Imagine you are writing a leadership book and you want to describe a manager as helpful, compassionate, gentle, kind, and clear.
Very often, what happened during drafting was that your brain was searching for the adjective you really wanted. It generated one possibility, then another, then another, and finally landed on the word that felt right.
That means the final word may be enough.
Maybe clear is actually what you meant. Maybe when you reread the sentence you realize that compassionate encompasses what you were trying to express better than the others. Or maybe you decide that all four adjectives are doing distinct work and you genuinely want to keep them.
That is fine.
The point of this sentence-level editing exercise is not that every list is bad. The list is simply a signal that there may have been some indecision happening while you drafted.
Searching for and gives you an easy way to find those places.
You can use Find in Word or Google Docs and move through the manuscript one instance at a time. Every time you see a list, ask whether all of those words are doing distinct work or whether you were simply trying several possibilities before landing on the one you wanted.
This has become especially useful for separating human prose from some of the patterns readers increasingly associate with AI. AI writing very often produces lists of three, and those three words are frequently synonyms or near-synonyms. We have written more broadly about how AI can flatten and standardize a writer’s voice.
If you want your prose to sound thoughtful and intentional, choosing one precise word is often stronger than giving the reader every vaguely related adjective you could have used.
Sentence-Level Editing Tip #2: Search for “Of”
My second tip also involves a tiny word: of.
Here we are looking for places where several words are connecting ideas that could potentially be expressed much more efficiently.
Just like with lists, this happens because we are often thinking while we draft. Sometimes the first version of an idea comes out in a longer, more drawn-out form because we are still working out exactly how the pieces relate to one another.
Let’s go back to our hypothetical leadership book.
Maybe you have written:
The most hesitant employee of the company…
Search for the word of, and suddenly we have a place worth examining.
What is “of” doing there? In this sentence, it is communicating ownership. That means we can often move the thing that follows of in front and make it possessive:
The company’s most hesitant employee…
That is a tiny change. But these tiny changes accumulate across a manuscript.
I find this technique particularly helpful when writers are dealing with abstract or complicated ideas. The prose can start getting what I sometimes call “clause-y,” with lots of small connecting words holding pieces of the thought together.
You may have of, on, and, that, or other little linking words appearing over and over as the sentence tries to carry a complicated concept.
Searching for of is not going to solve every one of those sentences, but it is a very useful clue. It often leads you directly to places where you were wrestling with a difficult idea and where the wording can now be tightened.
This is where sentence-level work starts making the writing feel more intentional. You already figured out what you want to say during drafting and structural revision. Now you can ask whether you are saying it as efficiently as you can.
As a general rule, a shorter statement is often more powerful when you can shorten it without losing meaning. You are not cutting for the sake of being terse. You are removing words that are not helping the reader.
That is also one reason I want this stage to happen late. Until the larger idea is settled, it is hard to know which words are unnecessary. Once the structure and argument are clear, you can make these smaller choices with much more confidence.
Sentence-Level Editing Tip #3: Vary Your Sentence Structure
The third thing I want you to look at is the shape of your sentences.
Most of us have habits.
Some people naturally write short, simple sentences. Other people—hello, it’s me—write long, winding sentences with several clauses and a lot of information packed into them.
Neither one is automatically better.
The issue comes when almost every sentence has the same shape.
If you tend toward short sentences, look for places where two could be combined. You may be able to turn one of them into a dependent clause that introduces the main sentence.
For example, maybe you wrote:
We walked to the park. The sun was blazing.
You could play with those same pieces:
Under the blazing sun, we walked to the park.
You have not necessarily introduced any new information. You have simply rearranged what was already there.
The same principle works in the other direction. If you naturally write long sentences, look for places where one of those sentences would become clearer or more energetic if you broke it in two.
You can also pay attention to how often your sentences begin the same way. If every sentence starts with the subject followed immediately by the verb, the prose can begin to feel repetitive even when the content itself is interesting.
This kind of sentence-level editing is less about following a rigid formula and more about developing your ear.
Read the paragraph aloud.
Do the sentences all seem to land in the same rhythm? Are they roughly the same length? Do you keep using the same structure?
If so, move the pieces around.
The words you already wrote may be enough.
What we are trying to create is variation and life in the prose, and that variation helps communicate something important to your reader: you have been thoughtful about how you are speaking to them.
That care matters.
Readers may not consciously think, Wow, what wonderful sentence variety. But they absolutely experience the difference between prose that feels monotonous and prose that feels deliberate.
Sentence-Level Editing Should Be the Last Part of the Process
These three techniques are intentionally small.
Search for and and examine your lists.
Search for of and look for places where the sentence can become tighter.
Then step back slightly and look at the variety in your sentence structures.
None of these will fix a manuscript with a broken structure.
That is why I keep coming back to the order of operations. Before you start sentence-level editing, finish the draft. Assess the whole manuscript. Revise the book-level structure, then the chapter-level structure, then the smaller sections inside those chapters.
Only after the larger pieces are working do I want you polishing prose.
If you are not sure what kind of draft you actually have yet, our piece on identifying the type of memoir draft you have can help you decide whether you are ready for polishing or still have structural work to do. And if you are preparing to self-publish, the same sequence matters there too: professional editing needs to happen in stages rather than jumping directly from a first draft to copy editing or proofreading.
Sometimes another set of eyes is also helpful before you spend weeks polishing sentences that may still need to move or disappear. Our Manuscript Review is designed specifically to give you that 10,000-foot view. We look at what is working, what is not yet working, how the manuscript fits into its market, and what revisions will give you the biggest return on your time.
The most important part is that you come away with a step-by-step plan for what to tackle first.
Because sentence-level editing really can be the fun part. You finally get to spend time with the wording, play with rhythm, and make all those tiny decisions that help the prose feel intentional.
I just want you to wait until those are actually the decisions your book needs.
