Hi, and welcome back. We are in the last section of the course. Can you believe it? It's moved very quickly. We are in the last section, which includes attitudes and habits. This is one thing that makes this particular course unique.

Some of them will have writing strategies and nuts and bolts, instructions and grammatical and style instructions, but a lot of them don't include habits and attitudes. And I think that's a really important section to go with the style to go with the grammatical instructions on how to improve your writing style because I think that there's a lot of overlap there. And there's a lot of just things that your habits and attitudes feed into those. And so strategy seven is attitudes and strategy seven is to set realistic expectations and trust your instincts, set realistic expectations and trust your instincts. Be realistic about what you can accomplish. That's one of the main things that I've had a problem with is that I want to try to take on too much, I want my work to be perfect.

And it can't do either of those things. And so that's one thing that we're going to some of the things we're going to talk about in the attitude section here. Also break larger tasks into smaller ones, and trust your own voice, instincts and interest. So be realistic about what you can accomplish, break larger tasks into smaller ones, and trust your own voice instincts and interest. Now, strategy seven technique one is don't over explain, don't over explain. And that one kind of overlaps with the ones that we were talking about with word economy with tightening your prose with cutting out unneeded words.

But this one is on a broader scale in terms of the attitude that you take towards your writing. And that's why this is a separate technique. Don't over explain. explanation is often less is more right or sometimes over explained to ensure the reader understands their point. Once again, I have a lot of weaknesses in my writer, my writing that I'm constantly working with and striving to improve and struggling with. And over explaining just seems to be one of those things that my brain is naturally wired to do.

And, like I'll have students say we get it, you know, but for me, I would rather over explain something to them than them not understand something. But the problem with that is that a lot of times there's an overcorrection there. And so something is overstated, and it just undermines the credibility of the reader, the writer, not the reader, and it also can be boring, it can make something needlessly long, so trust your readers intelligence and don't over explain present ideas clearly. On the other end. I have seen people that tried that so much, that didn't make sense. So you got to use your instincts and find that right balance.

But present ideas clearly but leave just enough unsaid that the reader can put ideas together on their own. Here's an example from a piece of fiction. Homer was a reliable, stable child, always keeping his younger brother Charlie safe and out of trouble. Once again, it's back to some of the previous strategies where you don't want to overuse exposition in most cases, you want to explain through the action, but also, you're just kind of beating the reader over the head. Homer was a reliable, stable child. But if you put that into the action of the story, you can tell the reader can imply that through the actions, and here's some action that does tell us that Homer was a reliable staple child, and that he was always keeping his younger brother Charlie out of trouble.

When walking home from school, Homer once stood between Charlie and an angry wild boar. He didn't have his gun. The hog mauled Homer for a full minute, throwing his body in different directions on the ground until his three brothers manage to kick it off. So we see See that Homer would do anything to protect his younger brother and to the point that he would potentially give up his life for that and so that he's a stable, reliable person comes through in the character that we see in those actions. And so don't over explain is technique one in strategy one of attitudes