“The dirty little secret of newspaper journalists is that a lot of them can’t write very well. That’s by no means universally true, but it’s true enough. I was a copy editor for years at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, where slot chief Vickie Kinney kicked my butt until I learned to be pretty good at it, and at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. I didn’t just write headlines and hook paragraphs. I transformed some real trash into publishable writing, saved my paper and some writers from professional embarrassment, and introduced relatively few errors on my own.”
