I can’t say that I recall the particulars of my first day as a production editor—a supervisor of copy editors and copyediting, proofreaders and proofreading—at Random House, some 30 years and a scant handful of months ago. Perhaps along with the key to my office I was handed a reminder of our departmental precepts:

Don’t impose the subjunctive on authors who don’t naturally use it.

Apply the series comma quietly and consistently unless you’re explicitly told not to.

Remember that it’s the author’s book, not yours.

The rest is commentary.

Or perhaps not; it was, after all, a long time ago.

“The past is a foreign country,” we’re reminded by L. P. Hartley at the opening of his novel The Go-Between. “They do things differently there.” And indeed we did. There was no email yet. There were fax machines. If your phone—a landline phone, to be sure, though we had no use for the term yet—rang, you answered it, even if you didn’t know who was on the other end. It might be your mother; it might be, as it once was for me, Isabella Rossellini silkily requesting a tiny but exceedingly late text change to her memoir, a change I promised to get taken care of (well, wouldn’t you?) before we went to print, even if I got yelled at for it. (I got yelled at for it.) And if you did want to make such a late change, you often had to cajole a design colleague to make the change by hand, razoring up a bit of plasticked text from a spare copy of what were then called blues, short for bluelines, and gluing it down where you needed it.

And, yes, I had an office, a state that persisted through three office buildings as Random House—eventually part of Penguin Random House, which itself grew larger and larger through various mergers and acquisitions—moved in a northwesterly direction from the East Side of Manhattan to the West. After the Plague Curtain descended in March 2020, I visited it nearly not at all, though it remained mine till, not very long ago, I packed up the last of my personal effects and shipped home four brimming boxes of books in preparation for my retirement this week.

Of course I recognized from the start that I was joining an ongoing cultural continuity, rather like stepping into an ambling river. This was the era of publisher Harry Evans and editors Jason Epstein and Bob Loomis, the last of whom had worked, and would continue to work, his entire publishing career, some five decades, at Random House. When I’d visit his office to discuss this or that important or unimportant thing, Bob might tell me about the time he saw William Faulkner shimmying down the hallways after a long lunch with publisher Bennett Cerf, or about working with Toni Morrison when she was still his editorial colleague and not yet the author of The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Writers like Jane Jacobs, Gore Vidal, and James Michener were still going concerns then, and among my early assignments were a new book about the Romanovs by Robert K. Massie, whose Nicholas and Alexandra I recall my mother devouring when I was 9 or 10 years old, and The Hellfire Club, a harrowing thriller by Peter Straub, whose Ghost Story I had literally run to the local bookstore to secure—well, literally strolled—after reading a newspaper review in 1979.

My work was localized, specific, nuclear: I focused on and fussed over the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, in the service of making sure that my authors were happy and that their books were published with as few inarguable errors as possible—preferably none, which I’m happy to report is an achievable state. And I learned as much as I could from my more senior colleagues, especially the three marvelous ladies-of-a-certain-age who’d been doing this work for decades and knew everything that was worth knowing about laying a pencil on someone else’s pages.

Language, then, was my business. And though English, I’m also happy to report and as you’ve likely noticed, is much the same now as it was in 1993—we don’t yet need to annotate late-20th-century books with footnotes explaining outmoded vocabulary, as we do with Shakespeare, and there hasn’t been a Great Vowel Shift in at least a few hundred years—observing and participating in the evolution of language, even on a relatively microscopic level, has been its own adventure.

In terms of pure and minute mechanics, there’s the urge to merge, as Cole Porter once put it (with a splurge, he noted), that leads us from light bulb to light-bulb to lightbulb, and in my department we’d dutifully await the arrival of a new edition of the dictionary to grant us permission to make changes we’d been champing (or chomping, if you prefer) at the bit to make. I recall the utter nerdery of our gathering in the hallway and riffling the pages of our just-arrived copies to see if town house had finally become townhouse, or if a rest room was, at long last, a restroom. (“After all,” a colleague once noted, “it’s not a room you rest in, is it.”) Only years later did I learn from a lexicographer friend that I’d carried the process in my mind somewhat backward: “We can’t change things,” he explained, “if you don’t change them first.” If only I’d known.…

Other evolutions were subtler—not quite visible to the naked lay eye, perhaps, but meaningful in ways readers might not consciously recognize but might certainly feel.

The ironclad rule, for instance, that all non-English text (though I’m sure I called it foreign-language text) should be set in italics began to rust and fall to bits. Such a rule serves one well, perhaps, in a novel about an Englishwoman living in Paris, unfluent in the native lingo and feeling anxiously isolated every time someone speaks to her in French, but what purpose does it serve when one’s characters shift from, say, English to Spanish and back again, not in any way lapsing into a foreign tongue but simply, well, speaking the way they speak? The use of italics is, as has been increasingly noted over the years, an unhelpfully othering, finger-pointing process. (Besides, the less use of italics on a page, the better. I certainly know that if I see a few pages set entirely in italics I figure they’re a protracted dream sequence and skip right past them, usually to no discernible loss.)

As well, the writerly habit—generally among white writers, that is—of presenting characters with the unspoken understanding that the characters, too, were white unless otherwise and explicitly specified was also mercifully on the wane. It seems to me that it’s fully gone by now, and I’d hopefully imagine that younger writers and readers would be shocked to know that it was ever the norm.

Also weakening, then moribund, and finally as dead as Dickens’s Marley: the use of the so-called genderless he, as in “A student should be allowed to study whatever he wants,” carrying with it the curious presumption that he does the trick not just for any given unnamed, unspecified fellow but for all the people on earth who do not happen to be fellows. For both writers and copy editors—as with dictionary alterations, we’re each waiting for the other group to make the first move in a linguistic game of chicken—better ways to express things have been devised, including the renaissance of the singular they, as in “When you hire a copy editor to work on this manuscript, please ask them to…” We all say it, of course—you know you do, listen to yourself—and have said it and often written it for centuries, but the singular they had been, in my experience, so proscribed in published prose, especially through the 20th century, that, I confess, it was an irksome struggle for me to finally chill out and embrace it and urge my colleagues to do the same.

And beyond the nonspecific singular they, we’ve also met up with the specific singular they, the pronoun (do please avoid the phrase “the pronoun of choice,” as sniffy a term as “sexual preference” when “sexual orientation” is meant) taken up by nonbinary people. In that case I sat back and observed, waiting to see which of various competing pronouns would dominate. Ultimately I wasn’t at all surprised that they and them won out over the more concocted candidates; it’s natural to embrace something familiar, even if used in a new way, rather than something that feels contrived out of thinnish air. For the record, I should note, sitting back and observing what writers are up to is an invaluable practice for copy editors: We don’t blaze trails for the evolution of language; that’s the writer’s job.

For 30 years I’ve done my best to be a steward of prose, helping authors make their books into, as I often put it, the best possible versions of themselves—first, as a production editor, book by book, eventually, as a divisional copy chief, setting a good departmental example and steering an occasionally unwieldy ship. I upheld the decades of care and precision brought to our work by my predecessors; now, as I’ve stepped out of that ambling river, it’s others’ turn.

Perhaps, though, I can add one precept to those I was handed when I arrived, and it’s a good thing, I think, both for editorial types and for vastly more normal people:

Listen.

Listen to what others are saying—and writing—before you start telling them how to do it better.

This is how language proceeds.

Benjamin Dreyer is the former executive managing editor and copy chief at Random House and the author of Dreyer’s English.