Editing too much is a less discussed problem than not editing enough, but it is a real one with its own characteristic products. The over-edited piece is recognisable: technically smooth, carefully qualified, precise in its language — and somehow flat. The quality that made it worth writing has been revised out of it. The sentences are better than they were in the first draft; the piece is worse.

This happens because editing and writing are different activities that work in different directions. Writing discovers; editing consolidates. Writing produces the energy, the unexpected angle, the sentence that says something the writer did not plan to say. Editing then assesses what writing has produced, keeping what works and improving what does not. When editing goes too far — when the consolidation extends past improvement into revision for its own sake — it tends to remove the very things that make a piece distinctive.

Writing for free is a contested practice, and the contest is worth examining. On one side is the argument that writers should always be paid — that writing has value, that unpaid work devalues that value for all writers, and that the request to write for free is an exploitation of creative labour that should be refused. On the other side is the practice of most writers at most points in their careers, who write for free regularly and for a range of reasons that are not all the same and do not all deserve the same evaluation.

The binary of paid versus unpaid is not the most useful frame for thinking about writing for free, because it treats all unpaid writing as equivalent when it is not. The essay published on a personal site and the article written for a platform that profits from the writer’s labour are both unpaid, but they are very different things.