I am so impressed by this article, that I have decided to use it at the next meeting of the Writers’ Collective, a group that my wife and I lead at our church. But I’m not waiting for that. I already applied it to my own work. I got out a piece that I wrote in 2009, a longish prose poem or shortish essay with poetic pretensions. I mostly used point 1, identifying many lines that simply didn’t do anything useful and cleaning up those that remained. Then I used point 2, looking up words. It’s not that I didn’t know what they mean, but rather that I had not carefully identified all of the shades of meaning and selected the very best synonym in all cases. The result was a new poem that ipoetry accepted for publication! Thank you.