What is the difference between blue line and red line editing?
Blue line editing is proofreading. When blue line editing is being done, grammar and spelling errors are found and corrected but the content of the story is not evaluated or even touched. Red line editing is far more involved. This is where the editor goes through the manuscript paragraph by paragraph, sentence-by-sentence, word-by-word to make sure that the readability is optimized, the story makes sense, and the characters are smooth and realistic people. This obviously takes a lot more time and is also what is primarily being done when preliminary edits are being done.
