When I submitted my letter about having a football-free Homecoming I was well aware that the editor of the opinion page reserved the right to edit any published material.

There is, however, a distinct difference between editing and butchering.

Had my letter been edited for grammar or spelling I would have been more understanding, but when the most important sentence is extracted from a document it tends to sound hollow and useless.

And that is exactly what happened to my letter. Somehow the editor managed to remove from my letter the single most important sentence and half of the preceding sentence.

I would rather not believe this was a random act of malice, but the only other possibility is that this is a case of plain idiocy.

Aren’t editors required to have at least some semblance of writing skills? A lesson appears to be in order.

For future reference, when you remove the subject of an essay, the conclusion doesn’t make any sense. This is an important rule I learned somewhere in second or third grade.

Thank you very much for your help in making me sound foolish, but it isn’t necessary. I can accomplish that well enough on my own.

You even managed to ruin most of the sarcasm in my letter, and that was the best part about it.

Next time you receive a letter from someone, it wouldn’t hurt to figure out what it means before you chop it up.

Terry Welsh

Graduate student

Computer engineering