A letter to a younger editor.

Fixing a sentence is quick to learn. The comma that belongs, the agreement that has slipped, the clause left dangling off the end of a thought — a season of practice and your eye catches them on its own. Improving a sentence is the work of a career, and I want to tell you, early, why the second thing takes so much longer than the first.

To fix a sentence you need only know the rules. To improve one you need to know what the sentence was for — what it was reaching toward before it fell short — and that is not on the page. It is behind the page, in the writer’s intention, and your task is to reconstruct it well enough to tell the difference between a sentence that failed and a sentence that has merely surprised you.

The restraint that is the whole job

Here is the discipline, and it will take you years to hold steadily: the temptation, every single time, is to rewrite the sentence the way you would have written it. Resist it. Your voice is not wanted on this page. The writer’s voice is wanted — only truer to itself, only with the obstruction lifted away. A good edit is invisible. The writer reads it back and believes, sincerely, that they wrote it that way. They did. You only swept the floor.

This is why editing cannot really be rushed, and cannot really be taught in a list. It is an act of attention paid to someone else’s mind, and attention of that kind has no shortcut. You will be slow at it for a long while. Being honestly slow is better than being carelessly fast — and the readers, though they will never write to thank you, can always tell which one they are holding.

Be patient, then. Fix what is broken on the first pass; you will get quick at that. Spend the rest of the career on the second thing — the sentence that is already correct and still not quite true. That one is the work. That one is why the job is worth a life.