I mentioned in a previous blog entry that I am going back through The Seventh Sense to cut out junk words. The biggest offender?

That.

I use “that” 450 times, which wouldn’t be so bad in a 300-400 page manuscript. Since it’s a little over 100 pages, the number of incidents seems a bit excessive. I’ve brought it down to 175, but I’d still like to cut that this number in half. Looks like I’ll be doing that for the next few days . . .