This reflective essay addresses a subtle but critical shift in the contemporary landscape of academic publishing: the transformation of scholarly editing from an active intellectual ethic into a largely procedural, workflow-management activity driven by speed and quantitative metrics. Drawing upon a recent concrete experience within UltimaComm: Jurnal Ilmu Komunikasi, the author presents a case study involving a manuscript analyzing digital stand-up comedy using Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotic model. The essay illustrates how a "second-level reading" and a modest, targeted editorial intervention—requiring the author to visually operationalize their qualitative coding via an analytical table—can significantly enhance epistemic transparency, clarity, and methodological integrity without compromising operational efficiency. Framed within current open science debates on developmental editing and peer review ethics, this piece argues that editorial rigor is fundamentally an act of scholarly care for the intelligibility, accountability, and traceability of knowledge claims.