by Claire Kehrwald Cook

isbn: 0395393914
subject: Nonfiction, Writing
finished: 1/22/2000

As a copy editor at the MLA, Cook built up a repertoire of tools and techniques for editing and improving text. This book is her attempt to share those techniques with people who want to edit their own writing. There are good reasons for doing this: the services of a copy editor are not available to most of us, and even if they were, the editor has far less freedom to change the text than the author. Cook presents hundreds of examples of bad sentences in dozens of categories, along with explanations and improved versions. I found the first chapter to be the most compelling: it's about removing useless words from sentences, and left me wanting to attack any bloated sentence I ran across. Line by Line is sometimes a difficult book, but it's probably the best resource I've found for sentence-level editing. Recommended.