another good reason to make cuts

Despite my earlier plans, I stayed awake to revise section 5C, just because I felt like it. Though the section was initially too short, once I worked on it a bit it ended up far too long.

I dealt with the problem partly by moving some of the material to 5D (a better fit for it anyway) and partly by cuts.

One of the things I noticed while doing so is that a great deal of cuts can be made simply by removing timid qualifying phrases from sentences. Even though I have a conscious dislike for such phrases, it was surprising how many of them were still present in my sub-final draft of this section.

It’s generally a good rule that you should either say something or not say it– a rule that affects not just qualifying phrases, but also scare-quotes and parenthetical phrases, as well as many footnotes. (I have to admit to usually ignoring footnotes in books: if the author can’t see fit to work a point into the main text, then how vital can it be? It breaks up the flow of reading to keep looking away at footnotes. I’ll usually scan the footnotes lazily unless I have a specific interest in the topic at issue.)

In any case, the straitjacket of my word limit on this project forced me to dump such garbage phrases as: “Now it might seem to some readers that…” I might have kept those in place if not forced to remove them by the word-count, but the style is now much improved by dumping them.

However, I am not a fan of ironclad stylistic rules such as “never use the passive voice.” Rules need to be broken in special cases.

Current Book Statistics:

Just two sections remaining.

*completed so far: 61 pages

*time elapsed: 23 hours, 17 minutes

I’m estimating 68 pages and 26 hours as the final statistics for this first half of the project.