"If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing"
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Safire lands the lesson by committing the very sin he’s warning you about. The sentence is a deliberate tangle of re-readings and repetitions, a parody of the earnest advice writers love to give: revise, revise, revise. It’s almost self-destructing copy, a line that demonstrates its point in real time by making you itch to edit it. That’s the trick. He doesn’t argue for revision; he makes the reader feel the drag of redundancy in their mouth.
The intent is practical, but the method is slyly performative. Safire, a language columnist and political writer who spent his career policing public speech, understood that “clarity” is rarely taught by commandments. It’s taught by friction: the moment you notice language is wasting your time, you become receptive to the fix. The subtext is a gentle accusation: if this sentence annoys you, good. You’ve just proven you can hear repetition, which means you can hunt it in your own pages.
There’s also a newsroom ethos embedded here. Re-reading isn’t presented as inspiration or artistry; it’s an operational discipline, the boring craft that separates publishable prose from first-draft throat-clearing. Safire’s joke implies a deeper skepticism about writers’ self-mythology: talent isn’t the scarcity. Attention is. Editing is where you pay it back.
The intent is practical, but the method is slyly performative. Safire, a language columnist and political writer who spent his career policing public speech, understood that “clarity” is rarely taught by commandments. It’s taught by friction: the moment you notice language is wasting your time, you become receptive to the fix. The subtext is a gentle accusation: if this sentence annoys you, good. You’ve just proven you can hear repetition, which means you can hunt it in your own pages.
There’s also a newsroom ethos embedded here. Re-reading isn’t presented as inspiration or artistry; it’s an operational discipline, the boring craft that separates publishable prose from first-draft throat-clearing. Safire’s joke implies a deeper skepticism about writers’ self-mythology: talent isn’t the scarcity. Attention is. Editing is where you pay it back.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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