I appreciate the compliments, Arfa.
I'm an aggressive editor, and really "lay into" a piece if I think it needs
it. (Most do.) My experience has been that most editors are "wussy", and
don't begin to do what's needed to improve.
When Jacqueline Kennedy was alive, "Esquire" (a porno-free men's magazine
that predates "Playboy" by 20 years) poked merciless fun at Ms Bouvier's
stint as an editor at a major publisher. "Mr Pynchon, I found a period in
the wrong place on page 275, and there's a semicolon on page 681 that I'm
not sure of, but otherwise, I don't see anything wrong." (Thomas Pynchon
writes immense novels, such as "Gravity's Rainbow".)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon
I do not, however, change anything for the sake of changing it. I can defend
every change I make, though the author might not always agree. My goals are
simplicity and clarity -- especially for readers not familiar with the
material at hand.
Most writers (myself included) overwrite, using too many words and
pointlessly repeating ideas (while omitting important material). One of the
effects of "paring down" the writing is that the piece becomes easier to
read and understand. I also change words for a more-exact or vivid ones. I
try to make the piece engaging, something that a reader will want to read,
and enjoy reading.
I was not generally happy with the editing my work received at "Stereophile"
and "The Audio Amateur". Ed Dell, publisher of the latter, apologized,
saying that he couldn't find really good people. Not surprisingly, the
magazine couldn't afford to hire good editors.
I'm a degreed EE, so I'm not working from a position of total ignorance. If
I don't know something, I check Wikipedia (which has lots of technical
articles, of widely varying usefulness) and the Web. I high whatever points
of confusion remain, so my boss can fix them (if he chooses).
One of /the/ great pieces of technical writing is Philbrick's book on op
amps. It's nearly 50 years old, but still has all sorts of useful
information, with the most-amazing indexing and cross-referencing you will
ever see in a book. Your jaw will drop. It's also a "good read". I cut my
op-amp teeth on it 40 years ago, and several years back an engineer in a
UseNet group (perhaps this one) sent me a copy. I treasure it.
Unfortunately, I think that the skill levels of many editors, don't match
those which you seem to possess. I think that many believe that just because
an article has been passed to them for 'editing', it must then be altered
and generally 'messed about' in order to justify the fact that it *has* been
passed to them, and that they have earned their fee. I have had articles
that I've written, totally mauled by an insensitive hand. Words and phrases
that I've chosen very carefully have been changed or removed, resulting in
(sometimes) a complete reversal of the intention of a whole paragraph, let
alone a sentence, indicating that the editor had no understanding of the
subject material, nor the people who were its targeted readers.
I have also had grammatically correct structures changed into ones that are
not, and correct spellings changed for wrong ones. By the same token, I
became very close to the editor of one magazine that I wrote for, and he
told me that my copy was a pleasure for him to work with, because the only
'editing' that he ever had to do to it, was an occasional slight precis-ing
of a paragraph to make the article fit the space available. This was always
done very carefully and sensitively so as to impact on the content as little
as possible.
