The Editing Horizon: Shaping the Argument First

The “write it perfectly” trap reached out and caught me yesterday. It’s hard to write when every sentence feels like it needs to be perfect. Yesterday wound up as a down day – a weekend, break, rest day, day at sea – and that was probably overdue anyway. Clearing mental space by dealing with the practical details of an impending snowpocalypse turned out to be the right match for my Friday. This morning I feel more refreshed.

To start back up, and to engage more productively with the happy intensity of editorial work <grin>, I have had to remind myself that this is the draft, not the final written word. The time to play with written rhythm and turn of phrase will come, but right now my horizon is narrower and more specific: the argument.

Note from the side-chorus: it is, truly, “happy intensity” once I get into my editorial zone, it’s just that sometimes it takes a long moment or two (or even hour or two) to get there. of writing is sitting with it until the writing actually happens. This is a separate problem from editing—but it often gets confused with it. See The Silence of Not Writing and What To Do About It or Starting From A Place of Blah for suggestions on handling the not-writing part of one’s writing practice.

That reminder matters, because “editing” often gets treated as a single, all-purpose activity. Sit down, fix everything, be done. But that’s not how writing (or revising or editing or making it better) actually works. Different kinds of editing ask for different kinds of attention, and trying to do them all at once is a reliable way to freeze. Tracking ideas across a chapter, noticing gaps or redundancies, and judging how a reader will encounter an argument require a different mental stance than choosing words or shaping sentences. Mixing those tasks usually means neither gets done well.

I think about it the way I think about practicing. You can play through a passage and tell yourself you’re working on everything at once. But real progress happens when you isolate each skill in turn, and give intonation, articulation, or pacing your focused attention. Tomorrow, it will be time to work on the same passage, but with the next skill in mind. Writing works that way too. You can “make it better” by flogging at it, but the best version will come by taking each task in turn.

So today I’m moving through the chapter segment by segment, and not in order. (I know enough about attention to avoid pretending it’s evenly distributed, and yeah, I should do section 7 while I’m fresh!) For each segment, I’ll ask the same series of questions. Does this make sense? Does it do for the argument the thing that needs doing? Might it better serve the chapter on reading, or does it belong here? When a section meets my standard for argument, I turn it green and move on. The polish can wait.

The goals for the weekend are simple: a lot of literal baking (is another “snowpocalypse” reference a cheat?), a lot of logic-checking (five sections today, five tomorrow), and some time with a few new readings that might reshape the argument itself.

That’s the lesson I wanted to share: set the right horizon for the work you’re doing today. When faced with editing, it's not failing if the draft isn’t elegant yet. You’re still drafting. Elegance comes later – after the argument knows what it’s trying to say.

Academic Games

For today’s post, to be clear, my role is amplifier first, and commentator second.

In case you wondered what academics do for fun, well, sometimes we weird out in corners of academia. This winter's winner from where I'm sitting is the 200-page published review of a 145-page book. No, that's not a typo; the review is longer than the book.

And the thing is, the writing of the review is just so, so, so quotably bad that my colleagues have turned it into a game. You scroll through the review and drop in at random and read a sentence or two, and decide if it's quoteworthy. And the joy of the game is that everyone's a winner. (There's a variant with extra points if your quote contains the word "epistemic" which appears 150 times in the review. And wow, the footnotes too! The whole thing is delicious!)

Credit to @jameschalmers.bsky.social and @benstanley.eu for drawing both review and game to my attention.

So, I have to admit that I delighted in this game. First of all, a review, as a matter of courtesy, should not be more than about 2% of the length of the item reviewed. Okay, maybe 5%. It’s pretty simple math: 300 page book at 5%: you can write a 15 page review if you’re completely nerding out. But that’s your upper limit. After that, you’re just in it for the kicks. And more kicks. Perhaps this meme could be instructive:

http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/540658-beating-a-dead-horse

It gave me all the feels – like watching a senior professor take the time to systematically destroy a graduate student in public during Q&A. (You know who I mean.) The world has no need for that; it’s neither instructive nor helpful nor even, at the end of the day, a boon to the human race. In fact, it’s kinda nasty. I’m glad that such behavior is generally condemned in the venues I’m involved in today; I wonder if the Comp-Law field might also have some things to observe about this piece, and suspect that it does.

And one of the reasons I don’t mind poking fun is that there’s hierarchy at play here as well; senior professor at the Sorbonne reviews book by scholars he characterizes as “unencumbered by reputation” (p.242). Well, refer to the meme above; you’ve already won that competition. Have some compassion.

But while compassion is in short supply, the game of quotability is over-amply supplied. In even a brief selection, Legrand demonstrates a series of writing quirks. I know that Comparative Law (and law in general for that matter) likes its literary flourishes. But these are, um, is “recklessly ornate” a fair assessment? You be the judge.

Start with over-the top image:

“even the kudzu-like proliferating orthodoxy that does not yet see retains the power of sight potentially allowing it to outsoar the darkness of not-seeing” (p.437)

Be proud of me, I did NOT ask Gemini to make me an image of Kudzu with eyes. Yikes.

We move on to over-the-top vocabulary:

“As rationality finds itself being relativized — the estimation of plurality must be a key factor in the comparatist’s allegiance to foreignness — comparison structurally invites conflict, no appeal to contrived and evanescent overarching commonalities being in a position to overcome the constitutive comparative dissensus” (p.428)

Relativized >>> evanescent >>> dissensus: the heat-o-meter just keeps rising as the sentence grows.

And, of course, there’s over-the-top sentence-building. Stop me when I get to a period?

“This review is not the proper locus to assess the merits or demerits of ‘tradition’ at any length although I am minded to specify that I consider Glenn’s move from ‘system’ to ‘tradition’ as largely cosmetic, a variation on the theme of David’s historically overarching model that remains deeply ingrained within orthodox comparative law’s ways generally and within the civil law’s manner in particular — which is why my preference easily goes to culture, a decisively more rewarding heuristic (tradition and possibly system, in the broadest sense of the term, being better apprehended as cultural subsets).” (p. 297)

Whew.

So, there’s a lot not to like. This review certainly wins some kind of academic Bulwer-Lytton prize, but for academia.

Why, oh why, do you think the editors of the journal chose to publish this? I suspect them of actually being kind of clever. Rarely do issues of comparative law make it into my headspace. After all, I’m a musicologist and a monastic historian, and I tend to dabble more in genre fiction than, er, comparative law. Yet as a non-expert outsider, I delighted in the inanities here, and was equally delighted by the community of scholars which came out to play with the materials.

There’s a sense of fun in being able to poke at such clearly contrived sentiments as those expressed here – and yes, to play a little bit of “I’ve read that, I have heard of this other thing, and oh, that could actually be interesting” with its footnotes. And, it’s low stakes – a chance to deal out an easy “my writing might be bad, but it’s certainly not THAT bad” card at the end of a long semester. Plus, we academics enjoy performative overwriting and disciplinary in-jokes, and this review provides a rare playground for exploring a bit of both elements.

So, you can chalk it up to "people being weird on the internet" or to modern-day publishing being a fool’s game. But now you know what at least some academics do for fun on their "time off."

Legrand, Pierre. "Comparative Law’s Shallows and Hollows: A Negative Critique on Ablepsy" [Review of Sabrina Ragone and Guido Smorto. Comparative Law: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023. 145 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 289339 0]. The Journal of Comparative Law 22 (2025): 239-439. https://www.pierre-legrand.com/ewExternalFiles/JCL_20-2_01_Legrand_ComparativeLawsShallowsAndHallows.pdf