Stephenson:Neal:The System of the World:496:Extemporaneous Jottings (Armaced)
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Extemporaneous Jottings
Extemporaneous Jottings are best confind to Waste-books, not to be perusd by others. It is my Policy to write out several Draughts of any Document that is important enough to pass under the eyes of Strangers or Colleagues.
This comment of Isaac Newton's reflects a mentality Neal Stephenson shared when he was a younger writer. This comment, coupled with Neal Stephenson's comment about himself (below) gives us some insight into this version of Isaac Newton's ego.
Neal Stephenson on Neal Stephenson on Smileys
It reflects a mentality about writing that I clung to early in my career but have since rejected. According to this mentality, the way to write well is to produce a bad first draft and then toil through many revisions, editing it and refining it to bring it ever closer to some supposed Platonic ideal. If you believe in this (as I used to) and if you apply it to the topic of smileys, you arrive at the conclusion that smiley users are lazy writers who could get along just fine without smileys if only they took the trouble to revise and edit their work a little bit, to make the meaning clearer. Of course, as Fahlman himself points out in his web page about smileys, this is not the way people actually write. Since I wrote my denunciation of smileys, I have become more interested in the way that people (including myself) actually do write, and have stopped worrying so much about how they ought to write. So, when I re-examine what Fahlman and I have written about smileys, I end up agreeing with Fahlman, and thinking that this Stephenson kid must be living in some kind of fantasy world.
Compare the process of successive edits to achieve a "perfect" texts with the developing of Wikipedia articles.