{"id":490,"date":"2013-01-29T21:35:48","date_gmt":"2013-01-30T02:35:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/catching_regressions_in_writing"},"modified":"2013-11-17T05:27:51","modified_gmt":"2013-11-17T05:27:51","slug":"catching_regressions_in_writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2013\/01\/catching_regressions_in_writing.html","title":{"rendered":"Tech Pubs Tuesday: Catching Regressions in Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Like everyone else, I make plenty of huge embarrassing typos. Over the years, I&#8217;ve tried to discover patterns in how and when I make basic errors.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the most common scenario is when I start out with a paragraph that&#8217;s correct, and then decide to wordsmith a sentence or clause within that paragraph. For me at least, this is a huge DANGER ZONE moment &#8212; there&#8217;s an excellent chance that fixing that little passage will actually spawn more errors.<\/p>\n<p>Just to pick a random example, I might start with a paragraph like,<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Perhaps one of the most common scenarios is when I start out with a paragraph that&#8217;s correct, and then decide to wordsmith a sentence or clause within that paragraph. For me at least, this is a huge DANGER ZONE moment &#8212; there&#8217;s an excellent chance that fixing that little passage will actually spawn more errors.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Then I decide that the lead sentence would be stronger if I said, &#8220;the most common&#8221; instead of the more hedging, &#8220;one of the most common.&#8221; So I change the paragraph:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Perhaps the most common scenarios is when I start out with a paragraph that&#8217;s correct, and then decide &#8230;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Oops! I forgot to change &#8220;scenarios&#8221; back to singular. There&#8217;s something about going back and focusing on a tiny section of text that makes me forget about overall coherence at the sentence and paragraph.<\/p>\n<p>If this kind of thing trips you up as well, you can do one of two things.<\/p>\n<p>Option A is to do what many professional writers tell you to do: write your entire rough draft without any editing, then go back and do a big editing sweep. Editing entire passages all at once means you&#8217;re less likely to make this kind of coherence error.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, I&#8217;ve never written that way. I am a writer who backtracks. Always have been, always will be.<\/p>\n<p>So Option B is to cultivate a sense of hyper-awareness anytime you go back and refactor something you&#8217;ve just written. This is the approach I take. If you go back and fix up something you&#8217;ve just written, the hairs on the back of your neck should rise.<\/p>\n<p>If it helps, you can think of it this way:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>each sentence in a paragraph is like a function<\/li>\n<li>all the sentences in a paragraph work together like a collection of functions in a small class or module<\/li>\n<li>if you tweak a sentence that already works, that&#8217;s like changing the arguments or the return value of a function that already works. So&#8230; are you <em>sure<\/em> you didn&#8217;t screw up something else that depends on that sentence?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You might be wondering, &#8220;Are there test suites for sentences?&#8221; In fact, yes, there are! These test suites are called &#8220;technical copyeditors,&#8221; and they&#8217;re very expensive to run (even once).<\/p>\n<p>So in lieu of that, your next best option is to go back and eyeball the rest of the paragraph. At a minimum, carefully read the preceding and following clauses for tense agreement, etc. That should catch most of these &#8220;regression&#8221; style writing errors, but keep in mind that the best defense is always to get another pair of eyes on your work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unfortunately, I&#8217;ve never written that way. I am a writer who backtracks. Always have been, always will be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":553,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490\/revisions\/553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}