Hmmm, maybe I would proofread less if I felt that my original text had any meaning in the first place. I've read my consciousness streamed out on a paper and it looks like something made by Google Translate. I tend to write one word when I mean another, skip words that my mind forgets are necessary for context, and sometimes leave out essential words entirely.
Proofreading is also nice for reflection. I look at my sentences and see if there are better ways to organize my thoughts. Maybe one word looks better in this line. Perhaps I could be less repetitive. There are so many factors that affect good writing. Paragraphs sound better with varied sentences. Maybe you noticed that this paragraph has become dull. Every sentence I'm writing is now so simple. They are all about the same length. They all follow the same pattern. Without some variation in the length of sentences, prose becomes so tedious to read. However, if allowed little variation, the sentences spring back to life. There are little things one can do that add some spice to the writing. Prescriptive grammar gives names for all these things; prepositional phrases, subordinate clauses, simple/compound/complex sentences, but if you write and read enough you can start to feel them. Truly beautiful prose has mastered this readability, and the best writers would probably have trouble not writing so well. But, like all things, it gets better with practice. Proofreading gives me a chance to see how I'm doing.
To a certain extent you have to strip the thought from its original context. I don't think strictly in English, and my thoughts rarely confine themselves to grammatical rules. They exist as a combination of feelings, perception, imagination, and ideas that I have to wrestle down into words if I plan to communicate them. Words are like little boxes. I can't directly communicate to you exactly what's in my head, so I stuff my thoughts into words and ship them to you. The only problem is that when you open the box it's not the same thing that I put in. I had to cram the idea into that box, and it changed shape because of that, the pathetic mail service dropped it several times on it's way to your doorstep, and when you opened it, the idea changed again. The way I interpret things depends on the way I think, my own experiences, thoughts, feelings, etc., and the way you think depends on those things as well. So the trick is knowing how much to refine your writing for the reader. You want to maintain as much of the original thought as possible, but make sure it's something that the other person will understand.
Don't worry about staying on topic, that's what the paragraph separations are for ^.^ We can have several conversations all at once, and I don't want you to limit your thought based on what you think I want to hear.
Haha, you're so nice. I think, to a certain extent, it's the time I put into some of my poetry. Raven on a Silent Shore probably took around 30 or 40 hours of thinking, scribbling, rewriting and rewording before I got it to this point. Sometimes it's the form. This poem is also trochaic or iambic, depending on how you look at it, so it alternates between stressed and unstressed syllables. That gives it a certain rhythm which separates it from a lot of other poetry.
You are so insightful and I agree wholeheartedly. You make perfect sense, I hope someday to be so wise.