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Revisionist’s History

Posted on 25th April, 2005 at 7:47pm by joel

I have a problem. No matter how well-written anything of mine is—be it an entry here, a post at MAF, an email, whatever—I am utterly incapable of publishing it “finished”. Even worse, chances are that I revise the writing within minutes of publication. Case in point: last night’s entry. For those of you reading this […]

I have a problem. No matter how well-written anything of mine is—be it an entry here, a post at MAF, an email, whatever—I am utterly incapable of publishing it “finished”. Even worse, chances are that I revise the writing within minutes of publication. Case in point: last night’s entry. For those of you reading this site via the RSS feed (the Atom feed appears to have updated itself), compare the last point of the version in your news reader with the last point on my site. I wrote the post in TextEdit and was happy with it. I added it to my WordPress queue and was happy with it. I reread it again 10 minutes later and was still happy with it. I clicked “Publish” to post it, went to the live site to read it one last time and instantly felt the need to revise. Argh.

That said, I’m going to leave the news feeds as “Full Text” for now, but don’t be surprised if they’re scaled back to “Summary Only” in the future to ensure that my [two] readers actually see the final post (chances are, any changes are made within 15 minutes of publication. I typically don’t go back, say, 3 days later to change anything). Does anyone else have this revision problem or am I just weird? Lastly, feel free to place bets in the comments on the number of changes I’ll make to this post.

Filed under: meta, ramblings

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6 Responses to “Revisionist’s History”

  1. 1max sayeth:

    25th April, 2005 at 8:28pm

    I have the exact same problem… but wow, you write your posts in TextEdit? Do you just do that for your blog, or forums as well?

  2. 2joel sayeth:

    25th April, 2005 at 8:44pm

    I just write my journal posts in TextEdit. I don’t like the itty-bitty text-entry box that WP has. It’s a pain. Forum posts are always written on-site.

    I also like being able to save a local copy of my brain spewage in the same directory as any images I use in the post (and their Photoshop docs).

  3. 3Titania sayeth:

    26th April, 2005 at 1:49am

    Oh so very familiar. The hardest point is to know if a text needs fixing, it’d be good to fix it or if it’s fine and one should just accept the imperfection.

    I usually can’t and am continuously revising, redesigning or re- anything. And my own perfectionism is driving me crazy ;).

  4. 4John Pennypacker sayeth:

    26th April, 2005 at 7:54am

    I write and post it with a devil-may-care attitude and then reread it for grammatical errors. If I find them, then I edit. Typically, any edit I make occurs moments after posting.

    I’m not looking to win a Pulitzer or anything. And I like to think that once someone has read something I’ve written that it becomes history and I am honor-bound not to change it. I may post addenda, but I don’t often change what I’ve written for the benefit of those who might come later and wonder what used to be there.

    Though there are a great many topics that I simply don’t publish anything about. This being my actual name and all, I wouldn’t want casual googlers to get the wrong impression.

  5. 5Shawn sayeth:

    26th April, 2005 at 9:00am

    I’m kinda like John with the “throw it and see if it sticks” attitude.
    I do prewrite in an application though. If I’m at home I use xPad (then I have a catalogue of stories locally) and at work I’ll use notepad. I do this even though I made myself a nice big window to write in…

  6. 6joel sayeth:

    26th April, 2005 at 9:19am

    That last journal entry was the first time I’d ever changed more than grammar or sentence structure after-the-fact. I took the last two paragraphs and expanded my final thoughts a bit into three paragraphs. So no, I didn’t change my argument or cover my ass for something stupid I’d written or anything like that. I definitely believe in integrity and standing behind what I’ve written and while that urge to “fix” things will never go away, I am more than capable of fighting said urge and being up-front about it if I do make changes (in the form of an “Update” or “Correction” addendum). I just hope that I’m not sounding like I’m backpedaling too much.

    On the other subject of discussion…the more I use TextEdit, the more I like it. I just discovered last night that it has rudimentary kerning, ligature, and baseline tools. Not that those are useful at all when writing journal posts, but that’s still a pretty cool find.