One hundred percent. It's interesting how general awareness of the crucial role of editors, except among editors themselves and the writers who work with them, tends to go overlooked. Most people read a book or article and assume the writer just wrote it, that's all, and is now speaking to them in unfiltered form, when in fact the thing has been helped along in substantial ways via the writer's collaboration with an editor. The Perell quote that you included is of course key: We're all blind to some extent, on some level, when we look at our own writing. We deeply need the eyes of someone else to help us see what we cannot otherwise see. For years off and on, I have professionally edited academic writing (dissertations, papers, etc.) for graduate students, and inevitably there come moments when each client expresses amazement at things I see in the text that they couldn't see even though they had labored over it and reread it a dozen times before sending it to me.
One hundred percent. It's interesting how general awareness of the crucial role of editors, except among editors themselves and the writers who work with them, tends to go overlooked. Most people read a book or article and assume the writer just wrote it, that's all, and is now speaking to them in unfiltered form, when in fact the thing has been helped along in substantial ways via the writer's collaboration with an editor. The Perell quote that you included is of course key: We're all blind to some extent, on some level, when we look at our own writing. We deeply need the eyes of someone else to help us see what we cannot otherwise see. For years off and on, I have professionally edited academic writing (dissertations, papers, etc.) for graduate students, and inevitably there come moments when each client expresses amazement at things I see in the text that they couldn't see even though they had labored over it and reread it a dozen times before sending it to me.