A light edit removes what a first draft leaves behind — filler, false starts, the point made three times — without touching your wording. It is held to a length check: if the edit drifts too far from what you wrote, it is thrown away and you keep your own words.
Tool
Filler and repetition out, your wording kept
What it does, precisely
- Removes filler, false starts and unintended repetition
- Leaves your word choices, rhythm and idiom alone
- Rejects its own edit if the text drifts too far from your original length
- Shows every change beside your Exact Text for you to accept or refuse
Free opening chapter review — on your own pages
Paste or upload up to 5,000 words. You get back what the opening appears to promise, what is already working, where a reader may hesitate, and the three priorities worth fixing first. Free, private, no card.
This is an AI-assisted snapshot, not a human edit. You decide what belongs in the next draft.
What it does
Light Edit removes what is not carrying weight and leaves your wording where it is. There is a length-drift guard behind it: if the edited version diverges too far from your original word count, the edit is rejected outright and you keep what you wrote. That is a deliberate constraint against helpfulness turning into rewriting, and it is the reason this can be run on a draft you care about.
What this looks like in your genre
memoir. Memoir is where a light edit has to be lightest, because voice is the value. Filler and repetition come out; the odd word order, the phrase your mother always used, the way she circles back — those stay.
non fiction. Non-fiction drafts accumulate a specific kind of padding: the sentence that restates the previous sentence more carefully, the paragraph of throat-clearing before each section, and the explanation added on a later pass that duplicates one from chapter two. A light pass takes those out without touching the argument.
business. Business writing has its own filler: the corporate register that arrives when the author becomes self-conscious, the framework re-explained for readers who have already met it, and the anecdote that runs three paragraphs past its point. Cutting those is usually worth 8,000 words and makes the argument louder.
However you write
Runs on any draft, however it got there. Typed prose has its own filler — the throat-clearing first paragraph, the point made twice — and an uploaded manuscript written over several years usually has more repetition than anything dictated in one sitting.
The mistake: confusing tidying with rewriting
There is a large gap between removing the scaffolding from a draft and rewriting the draft, and almost every tool collapses it. You ask for a clean-up, you get back something smoother than you wrote, and the smoothness is the problem: it is a house style, not yours, and it has been applied to every sentence at once so there is nothing to object to in particular.
The tell is length. A genuine tidy takes words out. A rewrite keeps the count roughly the same while replacing the words underneath — which is why the length check matters more than it sounds.
What Your Book Pro does here
Your Book Pro is a writing studio for people making a real book. You bring the words — typed straight in, dictated if you'd rather talk, or uploaded from whatever you have already written elsewhere — and it does the work that normally costs thousands: structure, editorial feedback, proofreading, a cover, and a publisher-ready export.
One rule shapes all of it. Your words are stored as Exact Text and are never overwritten. Every suggestion arrives attached to a place in your manuscript, and nothing changes until you accept it. Where most AI tools quietly rewrite you into their own register, this one shows you the change and waits. Even the automatic clean-up pass is held to a length check — if it drifts too far from what you actually wrote, the edit is thrown away and you keep your own words. The editorial standards behind the feedback are our own, written for books and specific to your genre, not a general chatbot answering in a good mood.
Light Edit is held to a length-drift guard: if the edited version diverges too far from your own word count, the edit is rejected outright and you keep exactly what you wrote. That is a deliberate constraint against helpfulness becoming rewriting.
A line editor reshapes sentences for rhythm and effect — a creative job this doesn't attempt. This does the narrower thing first, which usually reduces what a line edit needs to cost.
Where it stops
A line editor reshapes sentences for rhythm and effect — a genuinely creative job this does not attempt. This does the narrower thing first, which usually reduces what a human line edit costs you afterwards.
What this replaces
| What you are buying | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Line editor or copy-editor, light pass | £600–£1,600 for a full book | Usually priced per 1,000 words; CIEP publish suggested minimums annually. See /costs/light-edit for the full breakdown and sources. |
Run a light edit
Review my opening