Exactly. "Writing is re-writing". The final draft, not the first, should be presumed to represent the author's best intentions. And authors actually do exist, a

Exactly. "Writing is re-writing". The final draft, not the first, should be presumed to represent the author's best intentions. And authors actually do exist, and do have intentions, and can communicate those intentions, however imperfectly and incompletely. Cutting something from the final draft of a work signals the author's intentions pretty clearly: they believed for whatever reason and by whatever standard mattered to them, that the work was better off without it. That may have been for artistic or commerical or political considerations, but whatever they were, they were the author's and it behooves us to honour them. People who claim that authors do not have intentions or that those intentions cannot ever be known to any interesting degree seem to feel that they themselves are able to author works whose intentionality is fully decipherable. This is odd, not least because if communication between author and reader was not possible, it would follow that encryption is not possible, because encryption does nothing but interrupt the communication of the author's intentionality to the reader. An encrypted message can still be read as a string of random charcters, but none of the author's intentionality can be inferred. If the process of reading didn't involve inferring the author's intentionality, this would not be a problem, and an encrypted version of "A Wrinkle in Time" would be functionally identical to a plain-text one.