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I remember reading an article about how it's a shame that authors don't use pen/paper anymore, since we can't see their crossouts and things for rough drafts. I'd argue that this would be infinitely superior if authors would give us access to some revision history.
I find it fascinating to see how much deleting and rewriting the author did on the first two sentences of his Atlantic article. You can see the idea getting rewritten in many ways. Is this a typical way to write a magazine article? I wouldn't have expected so much time revising the opening sentences before getting the rest of the article in place. (But there's probably a lot of variation between writers.)
For me, I usually spend a day or two just thinking about it in my head. Going over what would be a logical thought flow and things like that. When I sit down to actually write, I tend to have very few revisions. My first draft is much closer to the typical persons 5th draft (I think), but that's because I've been revising and editing in my head first.
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I dislike revision-able software for a number of reasons. Privacy is the foremost reason. Yes, yes, "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear..." That old chestnut gets trotted out every time someone worries about security or privacy.
Since about 2000, I keep my documents in plain text only on an encrypted drive backed up several times over -- none of the backups are online, but I'm still good if my house burns down, my machines get stolen, you name it.
No, just no.
But I'm curious: Can one delete these kind of revisions displayed here? Those visible in the GDocs UI are only a few, mayor revisions (which may be troublesome in itself for people not knowing about it and sharing a document).
This is a very good reason to never use software in the so-called "cloud". I also remember years ago when someone showed me "Track Changes" in MS Word and other programs and how you could go back and look at, say, a bid offer and see if everything was on the up and up. You could see, esp. if the document was a form letter or canned response, to which other companies were offered different terms, you name it. I dislik…