Reconsideration |
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Only after you have written a draft and have discovered your way to your meaning, can you reconsider, for instance, what organization would be most useful for a reader. If you are to write in the easiest way--the way that gets ideas out of you most fully and completely--you will need to work over your writing to make it complete and make it more obviously understandable for your reader. As examples, you might need to remove needless interrupting parentheses, to be more concise, to make verbs stronger, or to make the complex simple and the imprecise precise. All of the shortcomings implied in these areas are probably caused by the need for ease in producing the initial text. Most of all during reconsideration, you will need to reconsider the clarity of your message, will need to find your gestures toward meaning and move more toward meaning itself. Jacques Barzun has said that, as writers, we have a meaning to put on the page, but instead put a gesture toward that meaning. Forever afterwards, we, the writers, see our meaning by reading the gesture, but the reader sees only the gesture. When, as writers, we say that we need to reread our work or when we edit our work, what are we really doing? Certainly not reading, for reading is moving from a state of lesser to greater knowledge, and the writer already has all the knowledge available in the piece of writing. So at best rereading our own work is a kind of checking process, and we are, by knowledge of our intentions, disabled from reading our own work. We cannot consider it as a true reader. For this reason, almost anyone else is a better reader of your writing than you are. Anyone else can see gaffs that would elude your eyes forever, can see faults of logic, can see wordiness, can see where confusion begins--anyone but you. And that is why anyone but you makes an excellent proofreader or, indeed, an excellent reporter on your writing, someone who can give you a reader's report on its effects. On the other hand, no one but you is a competent rewriter of your work. In fact, you may have noticed that people often rewrite your work very badly indeed. Where you sought to elucidate with subtlety, they apply the hammer; where you wanted a bold clarity, they swathe the idea in a shroud. Only you know your intentions though your intentions may be hidden from yourself until someone else takes a hack at rewriting your work. So writers labor constantly within irony: only others can see their work, but only they--the writers--can change the work competently. To move beyond this dilemma, writers need ways to change the text--to upset their text and disturb it--enough that they must reconsider the meaning. Two steps of reconsideration--Reorganize and Edit purposefully--are meant to meet the purpose of upsetting the text. |
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