Confessions

Posted on | August 20, 2010 | 1 Comment

The time has come, my few and faithful readers, to make a confession.

*deep breath*

Hello, my name is Meredith and I’m a long-winded write-aholic.

Okay, so maybe that’s not a technical term, but the affliction is very, very real. Even after 18 months of graduate school with professors shouting “BE CONCISE” at every turn, it seems I still cannot write a short blog post. Sure, when my grades depended on it, I cut and slashed words and paragraphs with no mercy. When left to my own devices, I become long-winded and wordy.

I blame my father (sorry, dad). He’s the same way, maybe even more so, and has never written a short email, letter or academic paper in his life (and I have the emails to prove it). And since it does appear that I am genetically predisposed to being circumlocutory and verbose, I fear I will always be inclined to write more than a normal person should.

There are probably a lot of reasons why I’m so wordy. I know it’s partly because I best express myself through written words. More often than not, my fingers just fly across the keyboard and what’s there is there, wordy or not. It’s also partly because I have this obsession with making sure people know what I mean. I’m not fond of confusion and misunderstanding, so I write more to make sure everyone knows exactly where I’m coming from (kind of like right now). I try to anticipate criticisms or holes in my arguments and preemptively address them – it’s a control freak sort of thing. (How I ever got hooked on Twitter, I’ll never know because 140 characters is pretty much the antithesis of what I’m usually all about.)

But I’m going to try to be better from now on, starting with this post. Before I end up writing too much, I’m just going to stop.

(But just let me know if you need clarification on anything, because I can totally write more if you need it. Obviously.)

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

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