A fun piece on "line editing"--the meticulous scrutiny, word by word, of a piece of writing by an editor, which aims to ensure that each word, each sentence, each paragraph, is doing the work the author wants it to do.  Some good quotes throughout, but I especially liked this: 

Delany thinks the “marathon reading” done by acquisitions editors “tends to blunt just those finer sensibilities needed to get inside a text and take it apart from within in order to make useful suggestions for improvement that the writer can hear and respond too.” The mode of acquisition is one of decision: this book works, it will sell. For Delany, that mode is similar to a writing workshop style of criticism, which will “list toward the generalized and effect-oriented, rather than toward the specific and causally sensitive.” These criticisms are not invalid, but they “refer to a memory of the text, not the actual experience of reading the text—which is what the writer, writing, is always more or less skillfully modulating and manipulating.”

I think about this a lot because, (a) I really enjoy doing this with my own prose (though I hate typing in the corrections), and (b), as a teacher of undergraduate and graduate students, I find myself not infrequently falling into the pose of a "line editor" for their papers; which is (a) enormously time-consuming (both because of the, ahem, target-rich opportunities their papers represent for line editing, and because I can get tunnel vision and obsess about this to the exclusion of other responsibilities), and (b) not actually what a teacher is supposed to do.  See, I think an editor perfects; but I think a teacher introduces.  That's a distinction that I've made to myself, it may not work for you, if you're a teacher; but for me it's important, a kind of aphorism that allows me to escape from a mistaken feeling of obligation.  I don't have to get my students to the highest pitch of their skills, I just have to show them the road, and point them in the right direction, and tell them that I, and others, will be able to help them along the way; but they must be the ones to walk it.

I have had this problem for a long time.  Some of my best teachers in high school and in college took inordinate amounts of time editing our writing, and I thought that was what good teaching was; it certainly was, for me as a student.  But now I think that that may be useful, for some students who can bear that kind of scrutiny; but for most, they really want to be given a few directions and encouraged to repeat the task again.

This to me goes to the heart of the many debates about teaching writing in contemporary higher ed, at least in the US.  I have two convictions on this that may be strange: teaching writing is essentially prepared by getting people to read good stuff, and notice why it's good, what the effects are and how the aims of a piece are accomplished, and teaching writing is mostly about writing a lot, writing every day, and getting that writing critiqued by a body of readers.  

Now "critiqued" here does not mean Olympean analysis, it simply means "here's what I took away from your writing, is this what you meant it to do?"  I think that writers at any stage can benefit from this, but beginning writers in particular need to develop a "reader's eye".  And that cannot be done without many, many hours of writing, and talking about writing.  In writing as in so many other intellectual labors, there is no royal road to competence.  There is only sweat.

I hope in coming years to align my teaching better to recognize these facts.