I know we all love to marvel at the idiocy of audiophiles, but the actual article we're discussing here says next to nothing about audio gear. It's a reflection

I know we all love to marvel at the idiocy of audiophiles, but the actual article we're discussing here says next to nothing about audio gear. It's a reflection by a copy editor on the craft of copy editing, and (IMO) a well-written one. I liked this bit, for instance: > We like to think, or at least we like to say, that each writer's voice is unique, but it isn't. Too often, what a writer most fondly feels is his unique voice is actually a combination of bad habits and received language and tones shared with all too many other not-very-good writers. The inspired copyeditor's task is to bend an ear finely tuned to hearing the least hint of unique music in a writer's voice, strip away the accretions of junk language and tone picked up in a life drenched in TV and marketing and promotional copy and political obfuscation and bureaucratese, and then revise, even rewrite the piece in whatever authentic voice remains. The job is to produce a final edited article written in the writer's own voice, but in language and tone more consistently and authentically the writer's very own than that writer can produce herself or himself. As someone who's done a little writing myself, I can relate to this. A good editor is someone who can cut the thing you're actually trying to say out of the tangle of spaghetti you carry around inside your head. And this passage would apply just as well to an editor working at any other magazine, it has nothing to do with Stereophile's particular editorial bent or the relative merits of green Sharpies.