“No, I responded. “No changes in wording. Nothing that might alter the meaning of any of his sentences. Maybe a correction in capitalization, once. Possibly a change in punctuation, here and there.”
“I hope you were taking punctuation out, rather than putting it in,” he told me sternly.
“Well, of course. Especially hyphens. I saw a few commas that I thought could come out, but a good handful of completely unnecessary, aesthetically-undesirable hyphenation, which I promptly removed. You can have complete faith in the integrity of that article.”
“You aren’t . . . you aren’t just telling me what I want to hear, are you?”
“Um. I’m not sure . . .” I faltered. “How do you want me to answer that question?”