Dear Geist,

Is it cricket for a book publisher to assign a full-book copy-edit to an editor who has no knowledge of the book? Okay, it’s my book, and I want someone who cares. Is that bad?

—Jason M, Winnipeg MB

Dear Jason,

You are right to ask for the best personnel your publisher has. But as strange as it seems, the editor who comes fresh to your work, knowing nothing about it, is just as likely, and sometimes more likely, to spot tiny mixups, missing punctuation, unclear passages, accidentally repeated bits and all the other things we writers do.

Here is the Oxford Style Manual on the subject: “The result should be a text that is as easy as possible to read and understand. In the short term most editors are marking up for the type, but the more important long-term goal is to insure that all readers find a well and clearly written book. Editing is a Zen-like discipline, since the result of all editorial efforts should be invisible on the printed page.”

May you and your book get assigned to an editor like that one!

—The Editors