I was struck by this picture I saw on the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog, which they found on the White House’s Flickr photo account. Those are the president’s hands. That’s his health-care bill signing speech. [UPDATE: A couple of commenters here have said it isn't Tuesday's speech; I was going by some of the content of the speech -- health care -- and the fact that the upload date on the photo is March 22. If anyone wants to analyze or report it out from what we can see, please do.] [UPDATE 2: see comments below.] That’s Jon Favreau, his speechwriter, next to him. Just look at what sort of line-editing you get when you write speeches for Obama. (Click here for a close-up)

A photo like this is thrilling, gratifying and also terribly frightening to anyone who delivers his or her own writing to an editor. (Or a group of editors.) I wonder how this picture makes other people feel. I see it and feel a swelling of pride — not in the president so much as in the hard work that goes into good writing.

But I also get a lurching feeling in my stomach. I have marked up my own drafts like this, and, when invited, I have done the same for other writers. (Though probably not to this extent.) I certainly have received manuscript pages back from George Hodgman that looked like this.

When it comes back to you in this condition, you have to take a deep breath and just deal with each mark, one by one.

At the Washington Post, we don’t edit on paper. The equivalent to this picture would be to come over to your editor’s desk and see your story up on his or her screen, filled with “red notes,” sort of like the edit-track function in Microsoft Word. Questions are in red. Cuts are in red. Suggestions for rewrites are in red. My eye is trained to immediately look for instances of red; only once, on an edit with Henry Allen several years ago, did I open the file and see more red than black. (Which turned out to be false panic — most of the red was actually a long note from Henry after the lead paragraph suggesting that I veered off in the wrong direction.)

I think Joel Garreau might have been the last editor I had who liked to mark up a hard-copy printout of a feature by one of his reporters. (Sometimes he’d disappear to the men’s room with it, which lends a whole new meaning to clean copy.)

I do know a lot of my colleagues still hit ctrl-P so they can edit their own work from a hard copy. Delightfully, we even have an option to print it out as justified columns of type in the Post font. I still love to print out a story and, if there’s time, take it with me to a quiet bar, order a glass of wine, and have at it.

I did a lot of that with Tinsel chapters — mark, mark, scratch, circle, fix, scribble [pause for sip of wine, maybe a Sancerre, maybe a Malbec, sometimes not wine, sometimes a Jack and 7] and then read on, scribble some more, try not to eat too many bowls of snack mix.

The sort of paperwork created by hard-copy editing mostly belongs in the recycling bin, but it is a gold mine for research archives and literary sleuths. It’s too bad future researchers won’t have many of this era’s marked-up drafts to pore over.

This picture also makes me think of how many people would shit their pants if you handed back their writing with this many marks on it.

Starting about a decade ago, there were lots of stories about teachers who switched from red pens to happier colors (purple, green) when marking-up student assignments, so as to soften the blow to kids who grow up in a cocoon of praise and esteem-building feedback.

You can only imagine what sort of parent-teacher conferences would be arranged, or formal complaints immediately filed to the department chair or dean’s office, if teachers and professors started handing back papers that looked like Obama’s edits. I say Jon Favreau is earning his pay. ($172,000.)

To answer the question all my journo friends have been asking me for the last three days: Yes, I saw the whole thing (the verbal and then physical fray Friday night, right on deadline, between an editor and writer in the Style section) and yes, I have many thoughts about it, and no, I won’t share a whole lot of them. (The story I’ve linked to, the second dispatch from Erik Wemple in as many days, is the most accurate telling of the event.)

The story has circled the globe — NPR, The Guardian UK, blogs galore. But, as I’ve told the media reporters who’ve called me (I have a bit of a reputation as a helpfully on-the-record Post employee to media critics in need of a quote), this is one I’m trying to stay mum on, because it feels like family.

Henry Allen was my editor for nine wonderful years. (I switched editors when I was made the TV critic in August.) There is not a day when he’s in the office that I don’t learn something from him. Henry, who is 68, had already decided to leave The Post. He took the buyout in 2003, and to my great benefit, has worked about eight or so months a year, on contract, ever since. As I’ve said many times, Henry’s already written every story I would want to do, and did it 8,000 times better, and has been a strong, generous editor and champion advocate of my work. Also he’s my friend and inspiration.

People love him; readers love him, still, and rejoice when he files, even though his byline appears a few times a year (since he is principally an editor). By this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a bronze Henry Southworth Allen statue being erected as we speak — maybe in front of the Newseum, except that Henry quite publicly holds the Newseum (the idea of a news-eum, the fakey word news-eum, even) in characteristically low regard.

The fight embroiders his legend, and if that’s the narrative people outside the newsroom desire here (brilliant elder writer and editor fights for the last shred of quality in the middle of the newspaper’s identity crisis), then I can understand that. Henry was angry for one very right reason: It’s about the work.

But everything else was wrong. What happened on Friday night was scary and sad; it was not enthralling and it did not have a Front Page, golden-era quality of glory. To think so is like believing that old cliche that all journos used to have booze in their desk drawers. Please do regard Henry as one of the greatest newspaper feature writers who ever lived and please do think of him as a tough-as-nails, thoroughly passionate editor who does not suffer fools. Please do allow this event to be a fantastic flourish to one of the greatest careers at the Post, as a stand-in for your own despair about the business. But also, dear journos? Get a grip.

My only other angle to the story is this: What made Henry snap was that a writer called him a naughty word, an epithet that rhymes with “coughstucker” and is playfully or spitefully reserved as a way to insult a man, by implying he’s gay.

Being an enthusiastic coughstucker myself, I would someday like to ask Henry if it was the insulting delivery of the word, or the subtext of gayness that the word implies that angered him most? Seeing as how our department is gleefully R-rated in much of its casual discourse, it’s hard to know. (The worst thing about all this? The possibility that we could all get hauled into a sensitivity seminar. Not Henry, of course, he’s outta there, but the rest of us. To which I say FUCK THAT, oops, I mean, aw hell, no.)

Back to my question: Was it about the person who said it? The way he said it? Or that it was said at all? If another person in Style called me a coughstucker, I’d just have to shrug and use the Popeye retort: I am what I am.