Fossils…bits left from earlier drafts…make a good draft look ridiculous.\u00a0\u00a0 For instance, I might start a sentence intending to put in a general noun–\u00a0 “When a soldier yells for help–”\u00a0 and then change my mind and decide to be more specific– “When\u00a0 a Captain Strongarm yells for help–”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Notice the fossil “a” before “Captain Strongarm?”\u00a0 Not good.\u00a0 Happens in the best of families, but still not good.\u00a0 I suspect that copy editors gloat over such mistakes, but nobody wants to give copy editors gloat points.<\/p>\n
Fossils often survive the first few re-readings–especially if they’re small, a single article in the wrong place.\u00a0\u00a0 And sometimes they even make sense.\u00a0 Not the right sense, but sense.\u00a0\u00a0 Hence the need to go over everything again.\u00a0 And again.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fossils…bits left from earlier drafts…make a good draft look ridiculous.\u00a0\u00a0 For instance, I might start a sentence intending to put in a general noun–\u00a0 “When a soldier yells for help–”\u00a0 and then change my mind and decide to be more specific– “When\u00a0 a Captain Strongarm yells for help–”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Notice the fossil “a” before “Captain Strongarm?”\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/8"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}