on writerly sloppiness

Music: Kate Bush: The Sensual World (1989)

Yesterday I finished revising a review essay for a major journal in my field. After the experience I am feeling a little demoralized, certainly embarrassed, and perhaps a smidgeon of ashamed. I'm not despondent, mind you, just a little rattled that the last round of copy-edits caught a host of gaffs. The most embarrassing mistake of all: citing "Mother Stands for Comfort" as if it appeared on The Sensual World, when I know darn well it appears on one of my top ten favorite albums of all time, Hounds of Love. I must relinquish my claim to Kate Bush expertise now; that sort of mistake is inexcusable.

Now, the essay I sent back yesterday is among the most heavily vetted of anything I've ever submitted for publication. Seriously. It is very nice to have one's work scrutinized so closely---but it's also somewhat akin to head-shots in HDTV: flaws will be found. I suspect part of the close scrutiny has to do with recent publication controversies in the humanities over plagiarism. In our age of the sound byte and the sample, we're all getting lazy about attribution. My own students think "riffing" using someone else's words or ideas is completely legitimate as long as the final assemblage/bricolage is their own (and you'll recall sampling only became a legal issue in the music world when The Verve got sued for "Bittersweet Symphony" not terribly long ago). Scholarly changes in the academy are afoot; as my own citation practices are getting lazy (e.g., citing the wrong publication year), some outfits are choosing to vet ever more closely. Heck, it's now becoming a way to get rid of tenured professors.

Although there is no excuse for writerly sloppiness (it's the quickest route to a rejection that I know), I nevertheless want to craft an apologia for the common mistake: I don't care how hard I proofread my own work, I never catch all my mistakes or gaffs. It's like I'm blind or something. I read every essay I'm about to send off for review aloud, and that often catches things. But mistakes always make it through to reviewers, and I must admit it is more common than not that a reviewer will say to me, "proofread your essays before submitting them." I swear to gosh that I do! I don't understand what it is, but blindness to my own writerly shortcomings seems---to borrow an unfortunate phrase from Obama---to be in my DNA.

In part I think the mistakes are a consequence of some of my writing techniques: sometimes when I'm writing, it just comes out. Ronell describes writing as "automatic" at times, as if the words and arguments are coming from outside of oneself (in point of fact, that's what I think sort of happens anyway). I've often had the experience of binge-writing for three days and then sitting down with this essay---the thing---and thinking to myself: "where the eff did this come from?" Like I sometimes don't remember writing the thing. This is especially true of writing love letters: it just bubbles out and in some sense the declarative "I" of emotional abandon is someone else.

Nevertheless, this phenomenon of everyone being able to see your writerly boo-boo but yourself speaks to some sort of writerly unconscious. I sometimes catch myself writing a malapropism (e.g., writing "right" for "write" and so forth, which belies and betrays something), but in general I have them pointed out to me by someone else. Regardless, if it were not for the proofreading of others I'm afraid my publications would be an huge embarrassment. So if you're a blind reviewer or editor of my work, please understand: something beyond me is writing those mistakes! I'm trying very hard to "see" them myself, I swear I'm not that lazy. This is why I often go easy on error-riddled essays in my own reviewing, I get it.

This is also why copy-editors and blind reviewers are deserving of our praise. Initially my reaction to yet another round of edits was anger: "not again!" I thought; "I've revised this a billion times!" Then I realized I was being defensive about something else, something beyond me, as if the copyeditor was seeing something about myself that I'd prefer to keep hidden. That sort of attitude just won't cut it, and not having that attitude when I started writing is in point of fact my own secret to success: admit you are not the genius, let others help you, and get over your goshdarn self. Right? Right. No sense in being a prima donna, no sense in getting righteous over my own writing because I'm not in full control anyway. I'm not in control. I must, as the Postal Service sings, "Give (it) Up." This is why we need to let-go of the romantic idea of the solitary writer and critical virtuoso: no one piece of scholarship is single-authored, and that's a good thing. Without other people we couldn't understand ourselves; we would be blind to our own mistakes. And we wouldn't publish.