“In the hurly-burly of a newsroom, where even the best reporters have widely varying degrees of grammatical competence, copy editors are the often unheralded guardians of language and common sense. They are the front-line mud soldiers in an endless war against bad spelling, ill-considered sentence construction and factual errors.
“They prevent English teachers everywhere from wincing. They save behinds.”
— From the obituary of Bill Walsh, The Washington Post, March 15, 2017
Bill was one of the finest — and funniest — editors I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. He died last week at the age of 55.
Also see: Linda Holmes’s appreciation over at NPR; and Bill’s own longtime site about copy editing: The Slot.