I Seem To Be Out Words

I've acquired a bad new.  As bad habits go, I don't doubt there are.  But the problem isn't that I'm leaving out words, but that I'm dropping the most ones.  The ones the entire sentence relies to be meaningful.  Initially, I thought I could stem early onset senility with a judicious application of.  Now, it seems I'm destined to drop a phrase and a word there.  Whole sentence units. 

What galls me is that they disappear multiple drafts.  I read my aloud.  I should catch these.  Yet here they are in what I purport to be my final.  These drafts are.  I've months polishing them.  There's reason for dropped words.  What is on here?  It's like my brain is fixing to.

I can't anymore!

Comments

[Sisyphus]

Scott!!!! Have I got a deal/plan/proposition/ solution/quandary for you. It seems we you and I have complementary/interlocking/balancing/ corresponding/harmonizing writing problems writing styles difficulties in our writing. I hate/loathe/am bothered by/am frustrated by the need to actually make a decision about which words the appropriate words to use. So therefore I always have a lot of them laying around and I always use too many of them and I tend to go round and round repetitively and repeat myself and then forget what exactly my point is is my point.

All of which which is to say, in short: do you have a zucchini peeler I could borrow. No, wait; something else...

[N. Pepperell]

I've been doing this too. I've also been substituting random word endings - "ing" for "ly", "ed" for "s". I think my brain has moved on, leaving the writing to my hands... They type whatever combination of letters they're most used to typing... I also keep catching the same typos on multiple drafts. I find them. I mark on the text to change them. I make other changes - all around them. But these particular errors, they never get corrected. They are still there, mocking me, the next proofread, and the one after that - waiting for the moment when I will stop seeing them, and they achieve their ambition to embarrass me in front of other readers... *sigh*

[todd.]

That's totally up, man.

Have you considered the possibility that someone is trying to send you messages, encoded in the words that you leave out of successive sentences? Try stringing them together sometime and see if it tells you you're a messenger from God or that aliens want to serve humans or something.

[Adam Roberts]

Today's Acephalous post is sponsored by Don DeLillo. Visit DeLillo for all your Clipped Stylistic needs.

[JPool]

My problem seems to be in the area of prepositions. Not only do I succumb to the contemporary disease of using "around" instead of "about", but I often seem to drop in entirely inappropriate prepostions without ever noticing them (until of course my advisor points them out to me for the umpteenth time).

Sisyphus, very funny.

[cpo]

*Everybody* needs an editior. More seriously, what you wrote was perfect. The lacunae are evidence of spontaneous degeneration.

[KWK]

It seems to me that, whenever one writes more than a few thousand words, basic composition prolbems such as this become ubiquitous. I've looked at my dissertation maybe a half dozen times since I submitted it last year, and I've found typos naerly every single time I even casually browse through the damned thing. Then again, I'm a scientist, not an Englilsh professional...what's your excuse?

[read]

all reads to me totally normal sentences

[Rohan Maitzen]

My husband drops words too (there was a famous incident with a batch of job application cover letter that we realized--too late--began "I am graduate student..."--maybe some committees figured he was Russion?). My errors tend to be of the cut-and-paste variety: somehow, bits and pieces end up the wrong places in.

[Rohan Maitzen]

That's "Russian," of course. Guess I was rushin'. Anyway, the moral of the story is, always get someone else to proofread your material! Eventually your lapses will cancel each other out.

[zz]

Isn't there a bit in a Moveable Feast where Hemingway talks about writing a story and then deleting the most important part of the story, the part that can't be removed from the story at all, on the theory that even though it's gone, the reader will still *feel* it. He says he wants the reader to feel more than he knows, or something.

Maybe it's like that?

Or maybe it isn't.

[Grimmstail]

I love Mad Libs!

[Grimmstail]

I love Mad Libs!

[Jason B.]

JPool: My colleagues and I discovered that college freshmen tend to abuse prepositions like that fairly frequently. I was compelled to include on my grading sheet a column for RPG--Random Preposition Generator.

It amuses me.

[JPool]

You know what amuses me (especially as I lick my wounds from being reminded that I make the mistakes of first-year college students)? Imagining you and your colleagues in your mountaintop laboratory where you make exciting discoveries in the field of Undergrad Error and design new instruments of grading.
Mwah. Ha. haa...