The
craft of
improving other people's
writing. It's absurdly fulfilling, taking a
mediocre sentence and
making it better. Copyeditors correct for
grammar,
punctuation, and
spelling, as do
proofreaders, but copyeditors also rewrite for
style and
clarity. I've rewritten entire
stories because the
writer refused to vary his sentence structure; because the writer obscured his point with unnecessary reliance on
cliches; or because he just ended up making himself sound
stupid.
Copyediting is like
QA for the English language. At
Netscape, during the
AOL takeover, we called ourselves
English Language Engineers.