Quandary

Of course I accepted the compliment with grace, but what's the proper reaction when an untalented author praises my editorial work, when I took a hands-off approach to the manuscript because the only alternative would have been a complete rewrite, with about a 20 percent loss in volume? Would the author have been as happy seeing the same material recast in a more understandable and less repetitive manner? Maybe, except that it's a field where everyone seems to write in passive voice, with long sentences featuring string after string of phrases requiring serial commas. When the prose extracts and case studies from a variety of other contributors all suffer from the same writing styles, who am I to get in the way?

One might say, but it's the copyeditor's job to make the manuscript better. I've done that. But it's also a sane copyeditor who recognizes when the work could become substantive editing real fast. And that's not what the job order is calling for.