I was trained as an anthropologist. I was interested in the history and philosophy of anthropological theory, and I studied descriptive linguistics, and French structuralism, seriously. Formally. As a college student and graduate student in a university.

In my field work, I worked as an archeologist.

There, I learned the importance of documenting everything found in a site, where it was found in relation to everything else at the site. You had to account for everything. You couldn't eliminate things that didn't fit--that were anomalies, or disconformities. You made sense of what came up out of the ground.

This affected my approach to editing.

Except for correcting minor errors, I don't edit. I make sense of it down the road. To edit is to alter, or falsify, the historical record of what happened.

It's like I'm keeping a log book of what I wrote, and can't go back and change the entries. They're what I wrote.

If it's wrong, I'll correct it the next time through.