Tight writing.

To start, let me say that I'm enjoying this class so much more than I thought I would. I knew I liked editing my friends' essays and adding commas where they should be, but I honestly didn't expect to enjoy reading the textbook for this class. I'm not one to get all mushy over the wonders of learning, but I'm really appreciating all the new tips and essential skills that I've read in Think Like an Editor. Whenever I read something I've never heard before, I can think of when to use it in my writing, and that's a really exciting idea to me.

So this chapter about tight writing and trimming to make it all more concise really struck me. Really, I just found it pretty amusing and this is why: throughout my years at UNH, I've had to write some pretty long English/History/Art papers; I know that in the big leagues of graduate school, a 10-page paper sounds like a joke, but the first time I ever wrote one, it was pretty difficult. Or maybe the subject matter was just atrocious, I don't know. Either way, I feel like I've been trained over the years to write these elaborate, flowery papers. Then this editing class comes along and just destroys that.

Last semester, I wrote a paper about Beckett's painting View of Pleasant Mountain House, and while it wasn't the longest paper I had to write for my American Lit class, it certainly called for some flowery language--after all, I was discussing art. Long story short, I used the phrase "paradoxical desecration," and I felt ridiculous then but definitely not as ridiculous as I feel now after reading all about tight writing.

This is my apology to the editing world.