Sublime

So the writer has responsibility to be fair to the subject, who trustingly and perhaps unwittingly delivers words and story into the writer’s control.

I had written Corps’ for each and every possessive Corps, and the copy editors said that the possessive of Corps should be printed as Corps’s. I thought I was in a morgue. I said so. The copy editors phalanxed—me versus the whole department.

My reason for bracketing the students’ superfluous words, instead of crossing them out, was to avoid violating their sacred prose. I wanted to leave the sentence intact for them to analyze. I was saying, “I may be wrong, but I think this can be deleted and the meaning won’t be affected. But you decide. Read the sentence without the bracketed materi

He warned the students against any effort by an editor to inject his own point of view into a writer’s work or to try to make him something other than what he is.