Whose head the reader is in

Point of view is the position the narration writes from: whose eyes the reader is behind, and what that person could plausibly know at any given moment. In third person limited, the most common choice in contemporary fiction, the narration stays inside one character's perceptions for the length of a scene, so it can report what that character sees, guesses or feels, but not what anyone else is thinking unless they say it aloud. An editor's first read checks whether this holds, because a slip breaks the reader's trust in the narrator faster than almost anything else on the page.

The slip has a name: head-hopping, the move between two characters' inner thoughts within a single scene, with no break to signal the shift. "Sarah wondered if he still loved her. James thought the question was unfair" reads smoothly enough, but it puts the reader inside two minds at once, and most readers cannot tell you why the sentence bothers them, only that it does. The fix is to choose one point-of-view character for the scene and let the other's feelings surface only through what they say or do: "Sarah wondered if he still loved her. James looked away."

Omniscient narration, where the narrator knows more than any single character and moves freely between minds, is a real choice. It carries its own discipline though: the movement between minds has to read as governed by a consistent narrating presence. A manuscript that mixes limited and omniscient without settling which it is doing reads as unplanned, and that is what an editor is actually flagging.

Single quotation marks, and what goes inside them

British convention for dialogue punctuation uses single quotation marks as the default, with double marks kept for a quotation inside the speech itself: 'She told me "never again", and I believed her.' This is the reverse of American convention, so a manuscript that mixes both within the same book is one of the first things an editor's eye catches, often before the story itself.

Punctuation that belongs to the spoken words sits inside the closing quotation mark, and punctuation that belongs to the surrounding sentence sits outside it. A dialogue tag that follows the speech takes a comma because the sentence carries on: 'I'm not going,' she said. Where the speech ends the sentence outright, with no tag to follow it, it takes a full stop inside the mark: She turned at the door. 'I'm not going.' The distinction sounds fussy stated like this and becomes automatic within a page or two of applying it.

A new paragraph for every new speaker

Each change of speaker starts a new paragraph, even when the line is a single word. This convention does real work: it lets a reader follow an exchange without a dialogue tag on every line, because the paragraph break itself signals that the speaker has changed. A page that runs two speakers together in one paragraph forces the reader to go back and work out who said what, and that re-reading is exactly the friction an editor's first pass is checking for.

These are mechanical checks, which is why they come before anything about plot or character: an editor can confirm point of view and dialogue punctuation on a single read, before ever weighing whether a scene earns its place. Running that same pass on a draft before sending it anywhere, in the spirit of How to Edit Your Own Writing, catches most of it before anyone else has to.

Showing and telling

Telling states a fact about a character's inner state directly: she was furious. Showing gives the reader the evidence and lets them arrive at the fact themselves: she slammed the drawer twice before it caught, then stood with her hand flat on the counter until it stopped shaking. Both sentences report the same anger. The second one asks the reader to do a small piece of work, and readers tend to trust conclusions they reach themselves more than ones they are handed.

The advice to show rather than tell gets treated as a rule, and plenty of editors and teachers push back on that, because a manuscript that shows everything is exhausting and slow. Scene-by-scene rendering of a character walking to the shop, buying milk and walking home earns its length only if something in that walk changes the story. The site's position is that showing is the default for the moments that carry emotional weight or turn the plot, and telling is the right tool for getting a character from one place to another without ceremony.

When telling is the right choice

A line like three years passed before she wrote to him again is telling, and it is doing exactly what the story needs at that point: moving time forward without asking for a scene. The mistake worth checking for on a read-through is not the presence of telling but its placement, where a sentence like that stands in for a moment that should have been dramatised because it is the one the reader actually came for.

What a first reader checks before an editor does

Before a manuscript goes to anyone else, a read-through aimed at these questions catches most of what a first reader would otherwise flag:

• Does the opening make clear whose story this is and what that person wants, within the first page or two?
• Is there a scene where the reader is told how a character feels, at a moment where watching the character do something would land harder?
• Does any stretch of more than a page or so pass without a change of some kind, in what a character wants, knows or is willing to do?
• Read aloud, does the dialogue sound like two people talking, or like one of them explaining the plot to the other?
• Would the chapter still make sense, and still want reading on, if the last paragraph were cut?

None of these questions has a single correct answer for every manuscript. They are the ones a first reader tends to ask without knowing they are asking them, and answering them on your own read-through is cheaper than having someone else ask them for you. The general editing pass covered in How to Edit Your Own Writing applies to fiction as much as to a report, and the same attention to sentence rhythm described in Sentences: Length, Rhythm and One Idea Each is often what separates a showing passage that works from one that just runs long.