David Gerard wrote:
2008/5/24 SlimVirgin:
Yes, it's a big improvement, but in fairness, it's not a major copy edit. It really is quite difficult to turn an article from something disjointed and poorly written into a flowing narrative. It's especially frustrating when the works gets reverted, or more often chipped away bit by bit over the following weeks and months. When we see a well-written piece of prose, we should hesitate to wade in unless we're sure we can improve it, but very few people have that attitude, maybe because they think good writing is easy, or because they think it doesn't really matter.
Actually, I disagree: content accuracy is more important than writing flow, and reverting or even discouraging the addition of new information for the sake of writing flow is very bad practice.
This seems like the opposite of Slim's complaint. She's not suggesting that new information be reverted or discouraged for the sake of writing flow. It's about those people who make later changes without paying attention to text flow. A careful writer can pay attention to text flow when adding new facts.
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