Or so I told my younger son, learning to be a print journalist at Humber. His summer job is at a nursery doing gardening type things which he was never interested in before.

You prune out the dead wood or edit the superfluous sentences. You prune the strangely branches and tighten up those run-on sentences.

In other words (pun intended) you maintain the natural shape of the tree or shrub and the end result doesn’t look like you did anything. Similarly a good editor will maintain the ideas and the gist of the article and the reader will be grateful for tighter, better reading prose.

Me, I’ll stick to pruning.