Is Copy Editing a Lost Art?

You can't rely on spell check. It only flags misspellings that create non-words. If you misspell a word and it becomes another word, it's perfectly ok with spell check. As if it weren't bad enough to rely on technology for something a human should be doing, it's just as bad, or worse, to ignore copy editing and proofreading all together. And what is scary, is that newbies to the biz may not realize what they don't know. These are kids who never learned to diagram a sentence. Sure, kids who did learn to diagram thought they would never use the skill, but if you write for a living, it's a good skill to know. When copy was set by a typesetter, there was often another check past the copy desk. The most valuable employee on many newspapers was the typesetter who went to a Roman Catholic elementary school. Nobody new grammar like those nuns. Nuns are far better than spell check.