In the past, I’ve written disparagingly about line editing as practiced with the ed editor. That’s not to say that ed isn’t a great editor or that it doesn’t have its uses even today, just that no one (in their right mind) wants to line edit if they don’t have to.
I still think that’s true but the other day, I had a mini-epiphany: almost all of us line edit everyday when we text: you enter a line (or block) of text and commit to it by sending it on its way. Once committed, you can’t cursor back to correct an error. That happens all the time to me when iMessage helpfully “spell corrects” a word changing it into something I didn’t intend. What to do?
I do what we all do: I issue a separate correction. If I’m chatting with a technical person, I even use the ed notation that all nerds know
s/us/use/
or, if I’m texting with a civilian
us → use
That’s pretty much the exact ed workflow.
None of this is has any great import or reflects deep thinking, of course. I just find it amusing that despite my demurrals, I, along with most of the rest of you, am still line editing.