On the subject of copy editors, One of my stories just went through one, and without any input on my part came out nice and clean, with my style (not always grammatically correct) completely intact. I do not know the name of this person who so naturally found the balance between correct and right, nor do I know the name of the person who laid out my prose very prettily for the upcoming magazine. There are probably many other people I don’t even know I don’t know the names of. Yeah, you’ve got your technology and all that, but there’s still someone hunched over printouts with a red pencil, making marks. And those anonymous and underpaid souls accomplish only one thing: they make people like me look better.
If I can find your names, I will thank you here personally in a later episode. In the meantime, hang in there, guys.
I once made a comparison between copy editing and making a chile relleno. You must enhance the flavor of the chile with your batter and your stuffing, but you must never make the chile pepper’s shape unrecognizable through too much handling or obscure its flavor with excess batter or stuffing.
A copy editor is such an artist. The original writer’s flavor must come through, as well as the structure; what the copy editor does is merely to enhance the original chile pepper.
Good copy editors are indeed hard to find. It is difficult to keep from adding one’s own style to that of the author. It takes a special kind of non-ego, a quintessential self-effacement that is foreign to many people.
Not me. I’m all that and more.