The diary’s crossed-out sentence

Text: an original contemporary editorial-memoir-style practice extract.

My grandmother’s diary included a sentence about a neighbour that she had later crossed out. I was preparing several pages for a family booklet. In the first draft, I typed the sentence because I could still read it beneath the line. The computer made it appear clean and certain, like every sentence around it.

Then I noticed what the typing had removed. The crossing-out was part of the page, not damage obscuring it. It showed that my grandmother had reconsidered leaving those words there. I could not ask her why. The neighbour was still alive, and the booklet would give an old private judgement a new audience. Accuracy required more than copying all the letters I could decipher.

I left the sentence out and added a brief note explaining that one passage had been omitted where the writer had struck it through. Another family member preferred a photograph of the original page. We did not resolve every question of editing that afternoon. We did agree that a clean transcription should not pretend to carry the whole history of a written line.

In this extract, the writer tries to show that preserving a record involves responsible choices.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.