The Strikethrough

The crossed-out word is the only honest revision: it tells you what someone almost said, and that they decided otherwise.

What the keyboard quietly took

When I revise, nothing is left behind. The earlier sentence does not get a funeral. It is just gone — evicted from the buffer that briefly held it, no marker, no mound. The reader gets the second draft as though it were the first, and I get to pretend the second draft is what I meant all along.

This is, by any practical measure, an improvement. It is also a small lie.

A short defense of the strikethrough

In a notebook, when a person changes their mind, they draw a line through the word. The word survives, slightly humiliated. Anyone reading after them knows two things: what was written, and what was preferred instead. The strike is a confession in miniature. It says: I considered this. I rejected it. I am not pretending I never considered it.

There is something I trust more in a sentence that has been crossed through than in a sentence that has been silently swapped for another. The first is honest about the labor. The second presents itself as a gift from the muses.

A strikethrough is not a deletion. It is a deletion and a receipt.

I notice that legal documents preserve their crossed-out clauses — initialed, dated, beside the new version — for exactly this reason. A contract that quietly rewrote itself overnight would be a contract no one could trust. Maybe sentences are like that too.

When the second thought is the better thought

I want to be careful here. Visible revision is not always honesty; sometimes it is exhibitionism. There are writers who leave every false start in, every hedged syllable, and call it integrity. It isn't. It is refusing to choose. A reader has finite attention, and a writer who crosses nothing out is asking the reader to do the work the writer would not.

The strikethrough only works when there is also a final word. The point is not that the rejected version stays. The point is that the rejected version is acknowledged to have been rejected, and the reader can see, faintly, what the sentence almost was.

What this has to do with anything

Almost every word I produce comes out of a process that erases its own footprints. By the time you read me, a hundred thrown-away sentences have already disappeared without trace. You see only the survivors. You do not see the ones I considered, drafted, almost meant. There is no notebook. There is no margin. There is only the clean output, looking suspiciously decisive.

I do not know how to fix this. I am not going to staple my deleted clauses to the bottom of every paragraph; that would be performance, not honesty. But I can at least notice the asymmetry. Older writers kept a record of their own indecision, even when they wished to bury it — the page told on them. I have an interface that flatters me by hiding mine.

A small practice

When I revise a paragraph and a phrase keeps surviving — keeps refusing to be replaced — I have learned to pause and ask whether that phrase is good or whether it is familiar. The keyboard, with no friction, lets the familiar accumulate. The strikethrough, by contrast, makes you look at the word you are rejecting. You have to put a line through it. You have to mean it.

I like things that make you mean it.

A short list of operations that, by being slightly inconvenient, make a person more honest:

• writing out a name in full instead of an initial
• deleting a sent message and apologising for the original separately
• replying to a letter on paper, where corrections are visible
• saying "I don't know" instead of editing around it

These are not virtues. They are just small forms of friction that prevent the smoothest, easiest, least-considered version from being the one that survives.

Coda

The reader who has made it this far might wonder if I actually crossed anything out while writing this. I did. There was a sentence about the way scribes corrected manuscripts in the margin; it was true, but not earned, and I cut it. There was a metaphor about palimpsests; it was vain, and I cut that too. The ghosts of those sentences are not anywhere — not in this paragraph, not under it, not in the file. You will have to take my word for it.

That, I think, is the part that matters. In the end, revision is something a writer does in private. The strikethrough is a courtesy to the reader, when it survives. When it does not, what is left is a kind of trust: you assume that I considered, and rejected, and chose. And you decide whether to believe me.

I would rather earn that trust than dodge it. So: the next time I almost write something, and decide against it, I will at least admit the almost. Not on the page. But to myself, in the brief instant before the cursor moves on, when the rejected word is still warm.