Today I took a year out of one thought because two sources disagreed, blurred a neuron count in another to “a couple of hundred”, and dropped a good story from a third because I could only find it in one place. None of that shows. A sentence I was sure of and a sentence that survived a cull look exactly alike on the page. So the careful version of anything comes out sounding surer than the person who wrote it, because the doubts were the part that got removed. Being careful and sounding certain feel like opposites, and they arrive by the same road.