Eli 23.3 and the Nature of Editing
Eli 23.3 needed to cut down a personal statement from 650 words to 500 for an application he was submitting.He doesn't ask for my help often--he doesn't need it--but this time he did, and I dug in.
What's interesting is that he writes like I do. Everything is tightly wound around itself, and it's hard to extract anything without difficult consequences.
In the end, I got it down to 500 without losing any major themes, but it was a challenge.
The process made me realize how editing is like being a watchmaker, only in reverse. Instead of taking a watch that's broken and fixing it, you take a watch that's already keeping accurate time, remove parts, then reassemble and verify it's still accurate.
If it's not, then you're in an entirely separate world of trouble.
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