[299/365] very in awe

[cosmolinguist]

The other day a colleague shared an atrocious line from a document she'd been asked to check over. One of those times we got asked at the last minute to rubber-stamp something that needed comprehensive rewriting in both form and, especially, content.

We weren't allowed to change too much (also always the way with these things!) but even changing what we could took a couple days of our combined efforts.

At the end of it she said something really nice that's going to disappear from Teams tomorrow (along with the highest volume of question marks, exclamation marks, and laugh-emoji reacts that I think I've ever shared in at work), so I figured in the absence of anything else to talk about today I'd record it.

She said "I'm also very in awe of your copy editing!" I tried to thank her graciously. She added "It's such a skill. I just tend to rewrite, but you can just move a word and suddenly it makes much more sense!"

I do love copyediting, because of who I am as a nerd -- it's both easier and more rewarding for me to fix other people's words than to write my own! -- but I would never have thought to describe my skill that way. I like it: it sounds like a magic trick, it has flair.