Editors

I think I shall compose a humorous poem detailing how much I hate editors or rather, the entire process of editing.

See, there are two kinds of editing. There is editing to get something down to a certain printable length and that makes sense to me and while I will grumble, I know that is necessary. But then there is editing that happens for no reason, like someone who changes all my "fors" to "becauses" just for the heck of it.

And then there is editing which really ticks me off because that happens when someone who has nothing to do with English is editing my paper. Would it make sense to you for a Chemistry major to edit English papers? No? Good, because it doesn't make sense to me either. I mean, there is the chance that the Chemistry major is really fabulous at English; of course that is sometimes the case, but not always.

Of course the editor thinks she is beautifying my work. And then again, since I edit other people's work, I think I'm beautifying theirs. So we all mean well in the end, I suppose.

But I feel like there are some people who edit things just for the sake of it because there can't possibly be an article that doesn't need to be corrected. That annoys me because it reminds me of teachers who won't hand out As because it's "impossible" to truly earn an A. One of the most awesome things about my twelfth grade English teacher is she didn't go in for any of this crap. I'd often hand her rough drafts and final drafts that were exactly the same and she didn't "take off" because I hadn't "fixed" things. The point was the quality, not whether there had been a checklist of edits made. This meant I took her opinion more seriously when she told me I actually did need to fix things.

I don't edit people's work just for the sake of it; I'm quite happy to let it stand and not to touch it if I feel that it's been written well- and I've done that many times. So why do some people labor under the delusion that everything in the world must be editable because there's no such thing as the perfect paper, no such thing as an A student, no such thing as doing well on the first try?

This once got to the point where I would fake mistakes in my rough drafts (in sixth grade, I think it was) in order to "fix" them and therefore do well.

Anyway, I respect people who edit my work and make logical comments but it kills me when we've got Chemistry people whose forte is Chemistry editing English papers! Why God, why?