On 12 feb 2008, at 0:33, John Levine wrote:
That's nonsense. You don't need a degree to use language.
Of course not, but I can tell you from experience having written quite
a few books that if you want a set of documents to have a consistent
readable style, we authors just can't do it. I think I write just
fine, but copy edits always, and I repeat ALWAYS, make the writing
more consistent and readable.
The way I see it, it's not the job of an editor and certainly not a
copy editor to rewrite significant amounts of text because the author
has trouble expressing him/herself. Readability and a consistent style
are the jobs of the author, with guidance from an editor, if any. Copy
editors work at a lower level by flagging ambiguities and cleaning up
rough patches in the author's command of the language.
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