Back in March this guy I swap drafts with at the coffee shop on Franklin Ave kept circling every word like 'whispered' and 'shattered' and 'ancient' in my short story. He said just say 'said' and 'broke' and 'old', see what happens. I thought he was crazy, that my prose would go flat like a pancake. Finally last week I tried it on a scene about my dad's old truck, stripped it down to bare bones. The feedback I got at the meetup was totally different, people actually talked about the moment instead of the fancy words. Now I'm wondering if I should go back and gut my other 40 pages too, or if that's just trading one crutch for another... has anyone else fought a critique like this and then found out the other person was just right?