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>"What would you say,"
>he asked, "if I said you didn't need all this detail here?" He pointed
>to a particularly cherished part of my piece.
Cathy,
I sailed through K-10 on the strength of being bright and doing really well in math, even though I couldn't string sentences together into a coherent English paragraph to save my life. But my 11th grade English teacher was a master at teaching composition (for which I have ever been grateful).
He presented the class, on the first day of the semester, a mimeographed one-page list of rules that, if we followed them, would turn us into competent expository writers. One of the rules was this: If you find a sentence in your essay that you are particularly fond of, delete it.
That's a rule I don't always follow in Internet chat (and I sometimes pay the price for ignoring it); but it has definitely improved the writing I've done for a living over the years. The man who interviewed you was wise to ask that question, and you were wise to under-react.
Dick
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