I made tea.
Scott McClellan has an excellent post out: A Call to Edit. Go read that first. Now check out this great tool. Take any text and begin expanding it. I'm trying to think how this could be used as an activity in reverse. Take a large body of text and reduce it continually until you're left with something that still holds all its meaning but is much more succinct and approachable. Imagine if something like that was built into a blog editor as an autocorrect feature. I type "Today I rose from the bed and walked to the window" and it fixes it to "I went to the window." We need to learn the value of stripping things down, removing the cruft, making more with less. I could go on a pro-Apple rant about how they start simple and add only necessary functions with their products, but I'll resist. Stop adding features and start adding constraints. That's where beauty is hiding.