Editing is Easy, but Revision is Hard

I’ve always liked learning about the mechanics of how others write. Common advice like "write every day" or "don't pause to edit" is fine, but what I really want to know is what’s going on inside your head, what are your fingers doing, and what does your draft even look like.For example, I have spent a lot of time writing on my phone. This works really well for poetry, but it’s terrible for essays. When writing longform non-fiction I like to open up my laptop and write my drafts in Microsoft Word. I worked with Google Docs for a long time, since it’s free and online, but I find it much worse for working through subsequent drafts of an essay.I’d like to distinguish between editing a draft and revising one. Editing is a lot like trimming a hedge. The content you want after editing is mostly in the document already. You might swap out words to improve style or clarity, or completely rephrase a few sentences. You will, occasionally, add a new paragraph, because you insufficiently explained a point, or find there’s a tangent you want to explore. But you don’t make deep structural changes to an essay when editing. When trimming a bush, you might cut the branches, but you rarely pull up the hedges by the roots and rearrange them.A full revision, or restructuring, is much more radical than editing. When I see advice to just “write” and edit later, I think to myself that this is a writer who doesn’t create many revisions! They are probably very good at determining the structure of their argument up front, so that even if their first draft were written with the vocabulary of a four-year-old, they could still edit it into a sensible essay. But revision is much more difficult mechanically than editing, because it is more spatially complex.Word’s track changes mode is very useful for editing, though I unfortunately went most of my adult life without realizing it was available, and only learned about it once I had to review redlines in legal contracts. Redlining makes your edits