Lately I’ve been noticing something interesting about my writing that I’d like to see if I can correct, and I wanted to mention it because others of you might recognize it in your own writing. I had the opportunity in the last few weeks to write some documents which were edited by people who are much better writers than myself, and one thing I noticed was them tightening up my prose. In particular, I noticed that I used certain words; I would call these “confidence words”, or more accurately “lack of confidence words”. These are words like “basically” or “generally” or “largely”, or phrases like “for the most part”. They are words and phrases which I was subconsciously inserting into my prose that communicated a lack of confidence in my own ideas and which made the prose harder to read. (See, in that last sentence alone, I originally wrote “which I guess I was subconsciously”, another great confidence phrase). I’m going to make a concerted effort to take these words out of my writing; if I mess it up, catch me and let me know!