Reining in perfectionism is a valuable practice for many reasons. Imagine hiring a professional to weed your garden. When they’re done, they hand you a massive invoice and say with pride: “When we got into it, it was clear that the garden needed to be rearranged and some new plants put in. So this invoice is larger than we estimated.” How would you feel? Why?
Today, in my How To column at Copyediting.com, I talk about reasons that a client might ask an editor to do a less intrusive edit than what the editor’s professional opinion says the piece needs—and why to honour their request. Unless you’re a bird, eventually, you’ve got to stop preening and hit publish.
Photo by Bill Majoros, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 license.
