Are you an eternal tweaker or the publish and be damned sort? I’m sure that at one time I was capable of dashing something off with the flourish of a self-assured swordsman, and dispatching it without a second thought. I’m sure I was. Almost certain. Alright, maybe that was in another life.

Now, I seem to spend the greater part of my days tweaking. I read and re-read my hand-carved texts, taking just an extra sliver off here and perfecting the embellishment there. By the time I hit the “send” button, there isn’t a word that hasn’t been interrogated for its usefulness. And then I read it one more time, just to make sure.

I say hand-carved advisedly. As well as writing, I’m also a printmaker. I carve the lino surface down, slowly, hypnotically, and only those lines which are left untouched will ever see the printing ink. Eventually, there comes a point when the image is ready to print and that’s that; no more messing about (well, perhaps an extra cut or two after a quick proof).

I used to write for newspapers, and that’s how it worked there too. Once you’d filed your copy, it was out of your hands, and the next time you’d see it was on the news stands. In the first few years I would read my articles faithfully every week in the paper. Eventually I learned to avoid reading them. If I had left in any mistakes – or as was more often the case, if the subs had inserted any mistakes – it was too late now to do anything useful about it.

Social media and DIY-websites have changed people’s attitudes to publishing. If you don’t like what you wrote, you can change it – even after it’s in the public domain and people have reacted to it. So the mistakes are legion, and the writing mostly loose and lazy. Speed is of the essence and – as they say with a wink in film production – “never mind, it can be fixed in post”. It never is.

Social media has also done something to me. Once I’ve worked and reworked my text, and finally pressed publish, the option to tweak is still tantalisingly available. It will be the death of my productivity. Back I go, and read it yet again, but this time, adopting the mental persona of various imaginary readers (or real ones who have shown an interest) in case it leads me to catch any nuances I hadn’t noticed before.

Modern productivity gurus will gasp. “Never touch things twice,” they’ll say. “Never write an e-mail longer than five sentences.” Over-thinking is the ultimate modern sin, tossed into the same pot as religion and trade unions, deemed irrelevant to this fast-paced, throw-away, digital world. The under-thinkers are in the ascendency.

As Elaine Aron put it in her seminal book, The Highly Sensitive Child:

“Traditionally, sensitive people have been the scientists, counselors, theologians, historians, lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers, and artists… But, increasingly, sensitive persons are being nudged out of all these fields due to what seems to be a cycle that starts with the nonsensitive moving aggressively into decision-making roles, where they… devalue cautious decision making [and] emphasize short-term profits or flashy results assertively presented over a quieter concern for consistent quality and long-term consequences…”

But the world needs its sensitive people, its over-thinkers, its tweakers. Things need to be touched twice if you want them to be as good as they can be, and not thrown away.

I was induced to do a timed test recently, for a job which was sold to me as copy editing (I’m good at that – I get paid to tweak to my heart’s content). I took their shoddy sow’s ear and crafted it into an elegant silk purse, and was not happy afterwards to be told that someone else had got “stronger results” than me. I pressed for more information, and as I suspected, “stronger results” turned out to mean: worked faster, quoted cheaper, and stuck to basic proofreading whereas I strayed into content editing. Good, I said. That’s exactly what I want to hear. I’m not cheap. I take my time. I make it the best it possibly can be.

If you’re a tweaker, like me, who will actually spend longer crafting an e-mail if you’re given a set number of words to do it in, then don’t despair. The world needs us. If we weren’t here, absolutely everything would be garbage.

PS, this document has been significantly revised since its first draft.

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About Catriona
I love to tell stories. My career has covered many bases, but communication has always been at the heart of everything I do. From journalism, politics and PR to art and design; from broadcast animation to published picture books and copy editing, it’s all about making people look and listen, and love what they hear. 

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