Thursday, October 7, 2010

A Reader's Guide to Author's Jargon 49

ghosting

a residue of cut phrases lingering after revision. Since good authoring means sculpting paragraphs so that sentences have a close interrelationship, when phrases, clauses and sentences are cut during revision, that relationship is broken and, in many cases, evidence of the cut remains. This is a wonderful side effect to revision work, because it adds accidental depth to the paragraph, which readers can sense as sub-text. Like ghosts, they are not actually there. Spooky, but true. It is unplanned, like that errant splash on a watercolor that makes the accidental difference between flat and exciting; boring and artistic.

Edward C. Patterson

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