Main idea

The file that receives raw speech doesn't have to look like a draft. Its function is not to prepare the text, it is to be faithful to the moment the thinking came out — with its repetitions, its doubling back, its clumsy phrasings and its corrections thirty seconds apart.

Smoothed out too early, it changes nature. It becomes a first draft, that is, an already interpreted object, when it was meant to be what the first draft rests on. What has been cleaned up is not recoverable: you no longer know what was said, only what was kept.

Primary material therefore has the right to be messy, and it should be a little.

Why it matters

This protects the one thing you cannot manufacture again. A clean text can be rewritten; the trace of what was actually said cannot. A hesitation, an internal contradiction, a word used then abandoned are information — and they are exactly what smoothing removes first, because they look like noise.

It also gives a filing criterion: what is faithful and what is formatted do not live in the same file.

Nuances and limits

"Messy" does not license the unreadable. Material too thin to be reread preserves nothing either.

And fidelity only counts if the material is actually picked up again. A raw file never reopened is not primary material, it is a dump.

Open questions

• What do you do with a correction the author makes during the exchange: it belongs to the material, but it is already an interpretation?