As if to fulfill my need to demonstrate an especially nit-picky, real-life instance of revision, an editor with whom I’ll soon be publishing an essay (on the modest topic of love in Shakespeare’s plays) has been working with me for weeks on a single sentence from a 5000-word piece. The assistant editor first emailed me about the sentence, which occurs late in the essay and concerns the protagonist of Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline:
The ultimate point, though, isn’t Posthumus’s failure, any more than is his failure to act out of compassion, rather than in defense of his male honor, the end of the story.