“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.“

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This is a favorite quote that means more to me now than ever. I have been writing publicly every day, working to get better at expressing myself with words.

Currently, my process is writing up a draft, and editing the next day before publishing. Editing is basically cutting out as many words as possible. Lots of the’s, that’s and this’s are unnecessary. “Very”, “really” and “literally” are words that just don’t mean anything any more — they’ve been overused to the point of becoming frivolous punctuation. I will add periods or new lines to break up big blocks of text, often also removing commas and words like “but”.

While typing this out, I considered how great it would be if this helps make me more aware when talking, able to eradicate those filler words and even “uh” and “like” from my speech. My knee-jerk internal response was, “when talking you’re live, not drafting and editing…”

Then, I had a bit of an epiphany: I could draft what I’m about to say in my mind, before I even say it!

If while writing the post for today’s exercise, I had a breakthrough that finally brought me closer to being able to control my tongue, a miracle just happened.