WRITING POORLY
Cringing at Re-Reading
Dammit!
While grabbing the link to a recent post about local wildlife, my eyes drifted to the first paragraph.
“The appearance of the eagle was startling as it left its unseen perch and flew low and directly overhead. Paddling upstream through the channel to Canada Lake, it disappeared around the corner where a sawmill once stood in 1867.”
No, no, no, no, no!
I’m almost positive the eagle was not paddling. Beating one’s wings against the air is locomotion, but clearly does not fit the definition of “paddling.” The eagle was not using a usually wooden implement, broader at one end, to propel himself through a fluid.
This should have said either “I watched as it disappeared around the corner…” or “As I paddled upstream, it disappeared around the corner…”
How could I have missed this? How could my dear editor also have missed this?
And were my eagle-eyed readers diverted by the imagery? Or in addition to being uncommonly bright, are they also so kind that they chose not to alert me to my mistake? Perhaps they conspired to spare me the pain of facing my own fallibility. “Let’s let this one go. He struggles with so many other problems…”
Or in the worst case for any would-be writer, perhaps no one read this glaring error. I refuse to entertain this possibility or the only slightly better thought that no one cared.
Maybe it was just that we were all displaying our humanity.
This could be the start of a new movement by human authors to distinguish our work from that of ChatBots. We’ll throw in an obvious error or non-sequitur just because we can. It will be like a secret handshake until the AIs catch on.
At least the pictures were nice. And deciding how to capture them will continue to be a very human activity, at least until the chatbot-controlled drones take over.
