John Keats… Ode to a Nightingale (http://englishhistory.net/)	Editing is an art. As with most passionate endeavours, when collaborating to bring out the best possible out of a highly creative undertaking, it often involves a complex love/hate relationship between an author and editor. Norman Podhoretz, in his article "In Defense of Editing," which appeared in the 1965 October issue of Harper's magazine, described an editor's role as follows: "to improve an essentially well-written piece or to turn a clumsily written one into, at the very least, a readable and literate article, and, at the very most, a beautifully shaped and effective essay which remains true to the author's intention, which realizes that intention more fully than he himself was able to do. He cares about the English language; he cares about clarity of thought and of grace of expression; he cares about the traditions of discourse and of argument."
	Writing can often turn out to be lexical minefield filled with well-meaning misuses, comprising such things as word clutter, confused antecedents, overdoses of clichés, suspect adjectives, idiomatic carelessness, the mixing of metaphors, misuse of relative pronouns, dangling prepositions and those all too infamous and often hilarious non sequiturs.
	Editing does not attempt to steal the original from its author and turn it into something else. The craft is intuitive, not scientific, demanding critical linguistic discipline and equally a lyrical sensibility that speaks with an elegant discretion.
	An editor's heart is set on pacing, flow and rhythm, judging what redundancies to remove and what to leave alone and perhaps the best analogy yet, is the comparison to an editor being much like a diamond cutter; searching the rough cut for flaws, knowing which edges to refine and then polish, so that the author's talent may shine through.

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