Hi, and welcome back strategy seven attitudes technique three, technique three states don't become overly attached to words, phrases or sentences don't become attached to words, phrases or sentences. And the attitude or the reasoning behind that is, if something isn't doing useful work, it's important to cut it. If you go back to the beginning of the course, we talked about the bracket technique and how you can gently eliminate words by putting brackets around words that might not be doing useful things that they're not saying anything unique. And in order to promote word economy and efficiency to make your sentences crisp, and to make them snap into activate them to eliminate those unnecessary words that weight down the construction of your sentences. And so there's an attitude to that as well. And so I think that's why it's important to incorporate it here as well.

Don't become overly attached to words, phrases or sentences. if something isn't doing useful work, cut it. Often riders become attached to clever and cute turns of phrase, but if they are not necessary, be brutal for the sake of your works overall quality. Once again, it's kind of corny, but, you know, you get attached to your writing I do. I do it all the time. I'm like, Oh, this is such a cool phrase.

And I'm trying to find a way to make the poem or the section in there revolve around this really cool sentence or this really cool friends and it's just not working. It's, it's like taking care of a baby. You get up at three in the morning and take care of the baby because that's for the good of the child. You know, you're not gonna just sleep through it on purpose. No decent human being would do that you get up and take care of your child because that's what your child needs. You could almost see your writing pieces a child what is best for it overall.

It's just like when you love your child and you have to punish them or correct them and they get upset and or you say no, and the purpose of that is because you love them because you want to help them to help to shape their moral character help them to be a good person who is happy. And in the long run, you have to do something unpleasant to help that situation. So it's kind of the same with cutting words it make if it makes your piece better, then go ahead and do it. Even if you're attached to the words, even if it's not easy, cut, be brutal when you have to be brutal. I'm not saying people would be brutal with their children, but in the case of writing, yes, be brutal. And so just keep in mind, technique three, don't become attached to words, phrases or sentences and example of that.

Here's one word has a lot of unneeded words and phrases kind of like some of the examples that we looked at in the earlier technique on that. If something isn't doing useful work cut it though. And here's the example. The air and sky were hard, steely and gray on that December day when I was eight years old, I paraded a red spandex leotard in which sequence red and silver down the front of the outfit. It had red tassels There's a lot going on there. There's a lot of images.

It's kind of not overwhelming, but there's just it's busy, almost like you can see the image of that leotard. Here is a better correction where a lot of cute maybe phrases or descriptive things were cut out that maybe weren't necessary, but it's still clear, you can still get a clear sense of it. It's not over cut. The sky was hard and gray that December when I was eight years old, I wore a red leotard red spandex leotard with silver sequence in red tassels. And so that one is shorter, it's still got a clear image of what it looks like. But a lot of that is cut out.

So don't become overly attached to words, phrases or sequences, sentences. And that is technique three of strategy seven