At the risk of exposing myself as the immodest asshole that I am, I’ll let you in on a little secret … I have a way with words. It’s preternatural. What I mean is I haven’t done much of anything to earn my chops. Didn’t start really reading for pleasure until I was in my late teens, and, even now, I read a lot less than you might imagine. I don’t practice or workshop. Well, you get my point.

Anyway, I bring this up only to say that I realize my verbal wizardry is not a skill or an accomplishment. It’s a freak of nature, plain and simple. And what I am about to do—rip someone else’s writing without pity of any kind—is a classless thing when you’ve done nothing to deserve your own fortunate circumstances. It’s rather like Lance Armstrong poking fun at my biking. (Yes, I fancy myself the Lance Armstrong of irreverent blogging.) Nonetheless, here we go.

Now, I’ve never mentioned exactly what it is I do all day in my deluxe, non-Copley-facing, non-window cube. That’s because a) I like to cultivate an air of mystery around myself and b) I do a little of this and a little of that, none of which I am what they call “passionate” about.

At the moment, I am copyediting a textbook on broadcasting. It is bad. Poorly written, poorly punctuated, poorly organized. This is not unusual; in fact, it’s my bread and butter. Don’t misunderstand. I grouse about shitty writing, even when I’m being paid handsomely to fix it … what it says about the state of education, the world, the very survival of our species. I rant about all the reasons why people … even those without my god-given talents … should be able to avoid a comma splice. Still, it is highly usual. The banality of bad writing is precisely why when you come across an example of stunningly ill-conceived writing it is cause célèbre.

Yesterday, I was slogging through a chapter on copywriting for radio. I broke up the monotony by periodically bitching to Em Em about the maddening suckiness of it all and my unspeakable misfortune in having to expose my eyes to it.

Then it happened. I saw it … the thing editors wait sometimes years for: the phrase that is so exquisitely misshapen that it transcends bad and loops back around to something resembling the divine, the phrase that without intending to turns meaning on its ear … day into night, black into white … well, you know.

“Avoid choppiness. Use transitions.”

Corny as it may sound, that phrase at that moment was manna from heaven to me … a validation of my misguided career choices, my freakish ability to spot grammatical errors everyone else misses, my very being. See, I may be an aggressive driver, an annoying and too-frequent drunk, a bad singer, a mediocre dresser, a fair-weather sports fan, and a very, very sore loser at Scrabble, but I can string words together better than this poor fucker. That’s not nothing.

Many thanks to the Uninvited Editor for accepting my invitation to edit this post.