Paksworld

Fossils…bits left from earlier drafts…make a good draft look ridiculous.   For instance, I might start a sentence intending to put in a general noun–  “When a soldier yells for help–”  and then change my mind and decide to be more specific– “When  a Captain Strongarm yells for help–”    Notice the fossil “a” before “Captain Strongarm?”  Not good.  Happens in the best of families, but still not good.  I suspect that copy editors gloat over such mistakes, but nobody wants to give copy editors gloat points.

Fossils often survive the first few re-readings–especially if they’re small, a single article in the wrong place.   And sometimes they even make sense.  Not the right sense, but sense.   Hence the need to go over everything again.  And again.  And reading back to front as well as front to back, in hopes of finding the fossils among the pronouns lacking antecedents, the misspelled words, the flat-out-wrong words, the sentences that go on forever (notice someting about this one?) and all the other stumbling blocks between the first draft and what we all hope will be a clean, error-free printed page in the reader’s hands.