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One further thing from me, about "editing" . . .

> I'm intrigued that you felt the need to edit before sending. 

I _always_ edit.  I even edit pen-and-paper inksheds, on the 
fly. I'm amazed that anybody can separate composing from editing 
(I believe I edit as I speak, and I think in fact everybody 
does: that that's what Jimmy Britton meant by "shaping at the 
point of utterance").  I certainly always edit email as it gets 
composed. 

(An example: I just went back and added the first "that" to the 
parenthetical remark, to make it clearer that I _think_ that's 
what Britton said, and make it clear that what I'm saying may be 
peculiar about me, and that maybe others think differently. I 
don't know how to stop doing that.)

Somewhere at the heart of our different views of inkshedding, I 
think, is a disparity of understanding about spontaneity and 
authenticity: Peter Elbow thinks (I think) that if you could 
just get rid of that internal censor, and let the discourse 
flow, you'd find things you wouldn't find otherwise: hence, 
freewriting . . . but when we started using inkshedding, we 
wanted there to be "back pressure" on what was being written; we 
thought that the expectation that the text needed to be clear to 
others would help the writer to use text as a tool to think 
with.

I also think that somewhere in here is a residual tendency to 
think (tacitly) of editing as "fixing," as getting the surface 
less embarrassing, rather than thinking of it as getting what 
we're saying right.

-- Russ

St. Thomas University
http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/

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