[Publius]

Jefferson and I share one problem. Our first drafts tend to be verbose and require a sympathetic editor with an unsympathetic axe. It took me a long time to learn how to edit.

Jefferson was unhappy with the work done by the Congress to change his words, but the editing sharpened the focus and elided certain issues that would have killed the document outright. Jefferson was not the only skilled wordsmith there, and we benefited from that.

[Hawthorn]

That first draft is not only verbose: I’d add turgid and convoluted to the descriptors! But you and Jefferson aren’t alone. There’s scarcely a truer statement than the old saw that, “All good writing is rewriting.” And to get an idea about how frequently this point has been made, click here:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22good+writing+is+rewriting%22&aq=f&oq=&aqi=