A Thousand Small Corrections

Chapter One: Track Changes

The sentence Clare Oakes had been staring at for eleven minutes was not, technically, a sentence. It was a comma splice, forty-one words long, sitting in the middle of page two hundred and six of a memoir called The Long Sentence, and her pencil had already moved twice to fix it before she stopped herself and read it again. I forgave him. It was not a decision, it happened slowly, like weather, and one morning I woke up and the forgiving had already occurred, the way frost occurs, without announcing itself the night before. House style said: split it. Two sentences, clean, correct, a period where the comma sat wrong. She had split worse sentences than this one for twenty-nine years without losing a night's sleep over it.

In the margin, in soft pencil, she wrote her query the way she always wrote queries — polite, deferential, a little apologetic for existing: Comma splice — suggest period or semicolon. Author may prefer as is; flagging per style. Then, because she had learned a long time ago that some queries needed an escape hatch built into them, she added: Stet OK if intentional. She drew a small box around the word stet, a habit from her first year at Fenwick & Dorr, when an editor twice her age had told her that a good copyeditor leaves the author a door, even when she thinks she knows which way the author should walk through it.