Just as she showed instinctive skill with the plants, pruning, pinching, disbudding, grafting, feeding or not, she went at the pages with a sure hand and eye, attacking flabby transitions, misplaced prepositions, and the bevy of exclamation points she considered in a class with women who squeal, "You don't say!" "Imagine that!" In Chapter 4, she gouged out "eyes like lustrous pansies" that had been "glinting sapphire" six pages earlier, and substituted "sapphire" throughout because at least it was preferable to "lustrous pansies."

When she had finished ridding a manuscript of all these blights, she often felt the virtuous satisfaction of a gardener who's spent the day weeding and squashing bugs. But there were times, especially with bad novels, when it was hard to keep from putting on rubber gloves and ripping out whole hunks of a book like poison ivy, and in Chapter 5 she found a section that made her fingers itch. The lovers were talking baby talk in bed, making up playful nicknames for their intimate parts. If they had beaten each other with pink and blue ribbons, she couldn't have been more revolted.

-- Open the Door (1966)