I caught up on a bunch of reading over the holiday weekend, which is both fun and work for me. When you’re an editor and a writer, you tend to read everything through two perspectives: one, entertainment and education; and two, professional scrutiny. I like to consider how writers and editors do what they do, and why they make the choices they make. And with budget cuts scraping away at the professionalism of the press like stripping paint, sometimes those choices are, well, a bit closer to the surface.

Here are a couple of examples that struck me as interesting:

When the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund sat down with Carly Fiorina, a candidate for U.S. Senate, who has a short haircut due to recent chemotherapy, Fund writes,

She laughs when I suggest her new ‘do may get her a hearing in precincts like Berkeley and San Francisco.

Since the line is pretty clearly a reference to butch lesbians—it makes little sense otherwise—is it funny or offensive? Would you keep it or cut it? And should the words “she laughs” influence your decision?

When the New Yorker’s Ariel Levy writes about South African runner Caster Semenya in Either/Or, she does a wonderful job exploring the challenges of defining gender. Her literary voice is personal yet professional. But then the final line of this paragraph jumped out distinctively:

She wore sandals and track pants and kept her hood up. When she shook my hand, I noticed that she had long nails. She didn’t look like an eighteen-year-old girl, or an eighteen-year-old boy. She looked like something else, something magnificent.

There’s no further explanation of this small but powerful endorsement. Should it have been included? Does it suddenly diminish the writer’s credibility, or is it just a helpful description? Would it influence your decision to know—as many New York magazine readers probably do—that Levy is a lesbian and generally outspoken on gay rights issues? And would you then reconsider her credibility in everything that preceded this seven-word sentence, feeling that her identity politics inform her journalism?

Or how about this, from the New Yorker’s Roger Angell, describing Phillies’ pitcher Cliff Lee in a terrific article about the Yankees’ classic World Series victory?

He looked a little dusty and work-worn out there…. I thought about Dizzy Dean or Lon (the Arkansas Hummingbird) Warneke, but they were righties. Then I remembered Hal Newhouser, the Tigers’ lefty ace in the nineteen-forties, who ate up batters in much the way that Lee does. Later, I put my question in a phone call to Seymour Siwoff, the dean of the Elias Sports Bureau. “Hmmm,” he said when I mentioned the flying back leg, “let me think about this for a minute.” There was a pause, and then he said, “Why do I think it was somebody on the Tigers?”

Well! That last line—there is no follow-up— is a bit self-congratulatory, isn’t it? Three sentences devoted to illustrating the smartness of Angell’s hunch. On the other hand, they’re kind of nice sentences and Angell’s not getting any younger. Keep them or cut them?

Choices, choices. Editing is a thousand small but important decisions—I could argue the above examples round or I could argue them flat—and I worry (not because of those examples) that the craft is on the wane.