Tui Qiao

CORE DEFINITION

The term comes from the Tang poet Jia Dao, who was said to hesitate between the characters for push and knock in a line of verse, and it came to mean the deliberate testing of alternatives in composition. As a method it holds that the first version achieves existence and revision achieves quality, so writing and polishing are separate activities with different standards. The core claim is that comparing concrete alternatives reveals differences that reflection on the whole cannot, which is why the unit of revision is the phrase rather than the document. The qualification is timing: polishing during drafting blocks production, and polishing that ignores structure improves sentences while leaving the argument wrong.