My text was corrected: How do I interpret the comments?

You finally got to the last word. You write it and feel triumphant. Adrenaline rushes through your body, and you think your text is good, no matter what. You are proud, happy, and you feel successful. You can’t wait to send it to the editor. What will the editor say? You’re expecting praise, congratulations, patting. You hear the “Very good!” in your head, over and over.

In the meantime, that other person receives the material and takes his time to read it. It seems to be taking forever. Why hasn’t he sent it back already? Why isn’t he saying something? I already did my part, now I want him to do his. 

The manuscript comes back days, weeks or months later. But, what a surprise! Instead of getting congratulations, praise, wonder or being recognized as a genius, you find a manuscript filled with corrections: “Missing a page number”, “commonplace”, “empty expression”, “confusing”, “expand this”, “clarify this”, “contradiction”, “epistemological problem”, “check meaning”...

You find multiple words that are crossed out, new commas where you didn’t imagine there would be any, hundreds of syntax changes, new paragraphs, dissected paragraphs, and changes of order, annotations to include things you hadn’t foreseen, new sections or whole sections eliminated.