Why do I need to create separate variables?

Hey Angela. It can seem tedious to assign everything to a unique variable, and it isn't always 100% necessary, but there are some good reasons for doing it at least most of the time.

Assigning each meaningful component of a script you are writing it's own unique variable is a good practice because:

1. It makes your code more readable. If you come back to it a few weeks or months later, you will be able to understand what you were doing more quickly if each element and piece of data has its own variable with a descriptive name.

2. It looks better to your colleagues and prospective employers. In a professional setting other developers will have to read your code, and even though you know what the code means, they may not and assigning good descriptive variable names helps others understand your code. This is also especially true if you are applying for jobs and want to show off your projects to prospective employers. An employer will be much more likely to consider you if the code you write is clean and easy to follow.

3. It makes your code more DRY. You may have come across the DRY principle - Don't Repeat Yourself. If you're writing clientside vanilla JavaScript, you may end up using event.target a lot. Instead of writing it many times inside an event listener, its better to write it once and assign it to a variable and just reuse that variable. Variables make your code more DRY and modular.

If you're writing a very small script, then assigning everything a variable might not be necessary. But as soon as you start writing anything bigger than a small little script, it's good to assign variables--especially if you plan to modify the code in the future or show it off to anyone. I hope this answer helps!