The lesson being that notwithstanding all the commonly asserted rules of prose one has been taught in school or read about in stylebooks, authors do, as Wolcott Gibbs recognized and, now, so do I, have their preservable styles, and the role of a copy editor is, above all else, to assist and enhance and advise rather than to correct—indeed, not to try to transform a book into the copy editor’s notion of what a good book should be but, simply and with some measure of humility, to help fulfill an author’s vision and make each book into the ideal version of itself.
