This is my report card on the production process. ... Copy editing: C I understand that the copy editor performs important tasks for you folks, annotating the manuscript to note header sizes and indentations and such. I can't speak to how well she did this; I can only address how well she performed the services I thought she was performing for me: the detection and corrections of grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. My own view of the copy editor is that she was a dangerous nuisance. I haven't done a careful count, but I would guess that about 50% of the changes she made were either irrelevant or wrong; then I had to change the wrong ones back. One of her favorite tricks was to take a section that was structured like this: CODE A Prose explaining that code A performs task A. CODE B A description of how code B performs task B. CODE C Discussion of code C and its performance of task C. And change the punctuation like this: CODE A Prose explaining that code A performs task A: CODE B A description of how code B performs task B: CODE C Discussion of code C and its performance of task C. I had to change back many of these incorrect colons. Another thing she liked to do was change "which" to "that" unnecessarily, in sentences like Any domain that has items which include lists of other items will contain tree structures. She changed this to: Any domain that has items that include lists of other items will contain tree structures. In some weird copy-editor dimension this was incorrect as written, but not in the dimension of native English speakers. Geoffrey Pullum, a linguist and co-author of _The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language_, says: _The Elements of Style_ offers prejudiced pronouncements on a rather small number of topics, frequently unsupported, and unsupportable, by evidence. It simply isn't true that the constructions they instruct you not to use are not used by good writers. Take just one illustrative example, the advice not to use which to begin a restrictive relative clause (the kind without the commas, as in "anything else which you might want"). But the truth is that once E.B. White stopped pontificating and went back to writing his (excellent) books, he couldn't even follow this advice himself (nor should he; it's stupid advice). You can find the beginning of his book Stuart Little on the official E.B. White website; and you can see him breaking his own rule in the second paragraph. That isn't the only such example. The copy editor also liked to mess up my parallel constructions by de-parallelizing them, perhaps because she did not like repeated words. Sometimes, though, I like to repeat words for oratorical effect. On the other hand, there were a number of real grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors that she missed completely. After correcting the errors that I found that the copy editor missed, and un-correcting the many non-errors that she found that she should have left alone, I was left with the sense that her net contribution to the prose had been small, or even slightly negative.