What a good editor brings to a piece of writing is an objective eye that the writer has long since lost, and there is no end of ways in which an edit… - William Zinsser

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What a good editor brings to a piece of writing is an objective eye that the writer has long since lost, and there is no end of ways in which an editor can improve a manuscript: pruning, shaping, clarifying, tidying a hundred inconsistencies of tense and pronoun and location and tone, noticing all the sentences that could be read in two different ways, dividing awkward long sentences into short ones, putting the writer back on the main road if he has strayed down a side path, building bridges where the writer has lost the reader by not paying attention to his transitions, questioning matters of judgment and taste. An editor’s hand must also be invisible. Whatever he adds in his own words shouldn’t sound like his own words; they should sound like the writer’s words.