Call Me at 6 on the Dot to Tell Me You've Learned or You've Not

Blow me a kiss from across the room.
Say I look nice when I'm not.
Touch my hair as you pass my chair.
Little things mean a lot.

Give me your arm as we cross the street
Call me at six on the dot.
A line a day when you're far away.
Little things mean a lot.

Kitty Kallen made that song a hit in 1954. The message is good advice for journalists always.

No, not the blowing kisses stuff.

The “little things mean a lot” stuff.

Among his many duties as an editor-type, Mose sticks his nose into other people's writing.

Only sometimes does he reorganize a story or completely rewrite a passage.

Mostly, he changes the little things that can mean a lot to conciseness, comprehension and correctness.

Not necessarily in that order.

For example, here are 10 little things he has changed in the past several hours:

1) Changed reconstructed to rebuilt (construction is a good noun, but build is a more conversational verb)

2) Changed relocated to moved (half the calories!)

3) Changed shear to sheer (sounds like ...)

4) Eliminated in order in the phrase in orderto (four times)

5) Eliminated the intersection of in the phrase at the intersection of (two times)

6) Changed the adverbial conjunction of condition if to the nounal conjunction whether (two times)

7) Changed pronoun they to an it and a their to an its because the antecedent was a singular noun (again ... sigh)

8) Changed purchased to bought (purchase is a fine noun, but a lousy verb)

9) Corrected the verb have to has for the subject “historical society” in a sentence with a compound predicate (the writer simply got lost in the complex construction)

10) Removed an apostrophe from farmers market (a matter of style)

And that just scratches the surface in the life of a copy editor.

Somebody blow Mose a kiss.