Delete

The one thing that could be said about the writer was that he was a bit finicky.

There were times when he would spend several days going back over and over a mere paragraph. This could well be a single group of words, numbering a hundred or so. Over extended periods the writer would be constantly getting up and walking away, then sometime later returning to his laptop and starting all over again. Over time it would be picked apart, with tense changes, adjectives modified, words swapped around, sections added, phrases deleted, and so on. There had been occasions when whatever he was fussing about would finally be deleted entirely.

It was during an impasse of this nature that things finally came to a head. He was yet again going through a period of self-torture when it happened. It was the day he decided that less fastidiousness would definitely bring about an overall increase in his wellbeing. This particular bone of contention was a sentence comprised of some seventeen words that was contained in a one-hundred-and-thirty-two-word paragraph. Finally, in sheer desperation, he shaded the contentious sentence with yellow highlight, and as usual, he got up and walked away to give himself time to think about it. On his return he found a red bordered box in the middle of his screen that contained a message.

It read: For goodness sake! Do you want to delete this sentence or not?

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