Bowers believes the aim of editing is synthesis of variants into one clear text. "A critical edition that pursues and recovers the author's full intentions wherever found, and correctly associates them in one synthesis, is clearly the only suitable edition that is complete and accurate enough to satisfy the needs of a critic" (25). Bowers concedes that with such a goal, editing is very much an art. There are two major steps to accomplishing this goal. First, one must exhaust the available documentary evidence of text and variants to determine the source textual material and then emend and conflate the authorized source(s) in an attempt to approximate as nearly as possible an inferential authorial fair copy. (26)

Bowers subscribes to the view that accidentals are most authoritative in the earliest available edition and substantives are most authoritative in the latest revised edition that contains fresh author intervention (a later edition within the life of the author, for example, or derived from newly discovered manuscript information). Bowers lists several categories of preparation that should be considered by an editor shaping the clear text:

treatment of press variants by establishing individual authority

emendation for correction (not for revision)

correction of positive errors

resolution of ambiguities in an author's style

uniformity of texture in spelling

silent alteration for trivia.

The final concern of the editor is preparation of the textual notes. Bowers believes the definitive edition is dependent as much upon the material in its introduction of textual history and its apparatus of noted emendations and variants as it is for the presentation of the text itself. "No reader should be asked to accept anything in the text on trust. In his introductions and apparatus the editor should place all his textual cards on the table face up" (42).

Bowers' list of preparations of a text just begs for challenge and of course receives it from every theorist that follows him. How can an editor distinguish between a "correction" and a "revision" when each editor brings his/her bias to the reading? What counts as trivia surely must differ from one reader to the next and if trivial alterations are "silent" then how can Bowers claim he is placing all the textual cards face up? Rather than analyze the weaknesses in Bowers' ideas of editing, let's hear first from the later theorists.