Some people say to write down everything and only edit later. I take the opposite tack. I used to believe that I rarely edited at all because I usually publish something as soon as it’s done. Then a friend watching me write said that she was getting seasick from my tendency to go back and forth deleting and rewriting the same sentence fragment or paragraph before moving on. Most likely the best writers combine both editing methods.
In the past, only the “edit later” method was even possible, because word processors didn’t exist yet. There’s really no longer any such thing as a “first draft” because we now tend to revise continuously instead of discretely.
Using a pencil and an eraser, unruled paper, and leaving lots of space between a line and the next (and, in extreme cases, a pair of scissors and some Scotch tape) you can do “incremental editing” (or a good approximation thereof) even without a computer.
rlwrap is especially useful if you have a tendency to say almost exactly the same thing over and over again. Just press the up arrow, and a copy of what you wrote before appears, allowing you to say almost exactly the same thing over and over again.
In the past, only the “edit later” method was even possible, because word processors didn’t exist yet. There’s really no longer any such thing as a “first draft” because we now tend to revise continuously instead of discretely.
Using a pencil and an eraser, unruled paper, and leaving lots of space between a line and the next (and, in extreme cases, a pair of scissors and some Scotch tape) you can do “incremental editing” (or a good approximation thereof) even without a computer.
Also, I’ve heard about people doing first drafts on note cards, which seems to allow for much easier editing of small passages as you go.
(Even without scissors, you can draw a square around a paragraph you want to move and an arrow pointing to its new place, and stuff like that.)
That’s a great point.
You can train yourself not to edit. It just takes practice.
Or a text editor that won’t allow it:
stty erase ″; cat >>myessay
If you still want backspace, you can omit the first bit of that. If you still want to be able to edit within the current line:
rlwrap cat >>myessay
Edited to add:
Not that I necessarily think this is a good idea, but it might be an interesting thing to experiment with.
rlwrap is especially useful if you have a tendency to say almost exactly the same thing over and over again. Just press the up arrow, and a copy of what you wrote before appears, allowing you to say almost exactly the same thing over and over again.
Actually, never mind, that’s silly.