Our domain is factual accuracy, spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, and house style, making all of them clean and correct.
We hold that all human beings, ourselves included, are born with an innate propensity to error.
We are skeptics, approaching each text with the suspicion that something in it is faulty, and that we will find it.
We stand in the place of the readers, asking the readers' questions and experiencing the readers' puzzlement, seeking to make the text clear and meaningful for them.
If you don't know, look it up; if you're not sure, look it up; if you're sure, look it up anyway.
We cut the wordy and the infelicitous, healing, like surgeons, with the knife.
We assist the writer in achieving their purpose.
Sometimes the most we can accomplish is to take the defective and leave it merely mediocre.
We protect the publisher from embarrassment and damage.
We know to take our hands off the keyboard when something is good.
We leave the work better than when we took it up.
We can talk among ourselves about writers' frailties and foibles, but not publicly.
We work anonymously, free from vulgar desire for public recognition.
