One of my pet peeves is this: reading my own work in print (finally) only to discover that some editor has hacked, sliced, and otherwise rendered my writing into incomprehensible form. It happened a few days ago when I re-read a column I had written. The column contained a multitude of comma splices, odd phrases, and wording that I never used in the original. Sure enough, when I went back and checked my submitted text (the one I had sent to the editor), it was an entirely different piece . . . no comma splices, no misspelled words, no odd phrases. What happened?
Well, it's a common practice that many editors feel that they have to edit . . . and if there is nothing to edit, many feel obliged to do something . . . including inserting commas into perfectly good prose, or taking commas out, or inserting words just for the fun of it. Now, to be fair, the best editors ask if they can make these types of wholesale changes, and the author usually has an opportunity for defense or rebuttal, even to explain the intricacies of commas and word selection. But other editors just want to tinker.
But here's my question: why would perfectly good writing be changed into incomprehensible gibberish? Help me, O great God of editors.
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