If you do then you have to understand what is or is not acceptable, what Stan Schmidt, Gardner Dozois, or Gordon van Gelder wants to see, and what you have to include to satisfy them.
Editors bring a blend of subjective and objective judgement to bear when selecting their stories.
Subjective judgements come from the editor's experiences, current situation, and expectations. A story might subjectively strike them one way of an evening, and quite differently on another occasion. The problem, when dealing with an editor's subjective judgements, is that they aren't susceptible to rational analysis. But an editor also applies objective criteria to the pile of submissions. Objective criteria have quantitative metrics, which is to say that each element can be assigned a value and weighed accordingly.