Ode to an editor

Copy editors receive little praise. They mostly get noticed when they don't do a perfect job. This piece, therefore, made me smile and say thanks. In What My Copy Editor Taught Me, author Dorothy Gallagher recounts learning how to read sentences and how to make her words count. The essay appeared in today's New York Times Book Review. Here's a passage that gets to the heart of what I think good editors ought to do:

Helene had no literary theories — she had literary values. She valued clarity and transparency. She had nothing against style, if it didn’t distract from the material. Her blue pencil struck at redundancy, at confusion, at authorial vanity, at the wrong and the false word, at the unearned conclusion. She loved good writing, therefore she loved the reader: good writing did not cause the reader to stumble over meaning.