I have been thinking a lot lately about how the simple act of crossing out a word changes what writing means. Not deleting. Crossing out. There is a real difference, and most of the time we miss it because most digital writing tools hide the act of revision behind the smooth surface of a final draft. You write something, you change your mind, you delete it, and the trace is gone. The reader never knows you considered another version. The thinking that produced the writing is invisible.

Strikethrough is the rare formatting choice that does the opposite. It keeps the original visible while indicating that the writer has revised their thinking. It says I almost wrote this, but on reflection, I am writing this other thing instead. The reader gets to see both states. The hesitation, the revision, the actual movement of the writer's mind, is preserved in the text.

I started noticing how much I appreciate this when reading drafts of essays online. Some writers use strikethrough deliberately to add humor or self-aware commentary. They will write something like, my favorite thing about working from home is the freedom watching shows in the middle of the workday the ability to manage my own schedule. The crossed-out version tells the joke. The corrected version provides the ostensibly serious answer. Together they communicate something more honest than either alone could.

Strikethrough is also the visual signature of certain kinds of intellectual honesty. In academic writing, when an author updates a paper with a correction, sometimes they will keep the original sentence with a strikethrough next to the corrected version. This is not laziness, it is integrity. It tells readers what changed and why. It treats the reader as someone capable of seeing the revision rather than someone who needs the illusion of a perfect final draft.

In personal writing, especially on social media, strikethrough has evolved into its own kind of slang. People cross out the polite version of a sentence to reveal the honest version underneath. I am fine I am not fine, I am exhausted and slightly heartbroken just tired. The crossed-out version is the one that is actually true, and the convention is that we both know it. It is a way of saying something true while pretending to say something polite. It is the punctuation of irony.

The mechanics of producing strikethrough vary depending on where you are writing. In most rich text editors, you select the text and there is a button for it. In Markdown, you wrap text in double tildes. But for places that do not support either, like a basic text field on a social media site or a username, you have to use Unicode tricks where each character is overlaid with a combining strikethrough mark. There are tools that do this conversion, like a strikethrough text generator that takes plain text and outputs the Unicode version you can paste anywhere. It is a small thing but useful in surprisingly many places.

What I find interesting about strikethrough as a feature is that it does not really fit into the standard taxonomy of formatting. Bold is for emphasis. Italics are for titles, foreign words, and gentle emphasis. Underline is mostly obsolete in print and now mostly indicates hyperlinks online. Strikethrough is different. It is not adding emphasis to a word, it is indicating a relationship between two versions of a thought. It is the only common formatting that comments on the act of writing itself.

I have started using strikethrough more in my own writing, especially in private contexts like meeting notes and personal journals. When I change my mind about something during a meeting, I cross out the original note instead of deleting it. When I revise a goal in my journal, I keep the original goal with a strikethrough alongside the new version. The trace of the revision tells me something. Two months later, when I look back, I can see not just where I am but how I got there. The crossed out thoughts are evidence of my own evolution.

This is the same reason I think handwritten journals will always have something digital ones cannot match. In a paper journal, you cross things out and the cross-out remains. In most digital journals, you edit cleanly and the previous version is silently erased. The strikethrough in digital writing is one of the few features that brings back this older, more honest mode of revision.

There is something philosophically interesting going on here. We have built tools that make our writing look as polished as possible, but writing is mostly thinking, and thinking is mostly revision. Hiding the revision hides the thinking. Strikethrough is one of the few remaining ways to leave the thinking visible without giving up the result.

If you write anything, try using strikethrough deliberately in your next draft, not for jokes but for honesty. Leave a sentence you almost wrote on the page, crossed out, next to the sentence you wrote instead. See what it adds. You might find, like I did, that the visible revision is sometimes the most truthful thing on the page.