Midterm Survey

The midterm survey got me thinking about one of my writing insecurities.  I've found that I preface many of my sentences with "I think" or "I believe" in order to give myself an easy out in case I'm wrong.  I finished writing an essay for a different class yesterday and I practiced overcoming this insecurity by reading over it again and deleting all those "I think" and "I believe" phrases.  I found that I liked the essay much more after I did that.  Here's one of the paragraphs from which I deleted all those phrases.

"Death is the great equalizer.  It comes to everyone.  As Marcus Aurelius said in his famous Meditations, “Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.” No amount of money, love, exercise, or medical expertise can keep it at bay for long, so I need to determine for whom or what I want to live my life.  Too often I choose to live in hazy denial instead of bravely resolving to fix my eyes on one truth, whatever or whoever that truth may be.  Studying other people’s truths, what they decided to live for, can help my truth become clearer. "