Week one

As long as I have been talking, I have been saying too much. As long as I have been writing, I have said that I write the way I talk. In most things, this statement is a quietly humorous piece of self-deprecation; I am fully aware that both my conversation and my writing are excessively tangential and long-winded. I am a huge fan of run-on sentences, parenthetical thoughts, and dashes—I have so much to say that I must interrupt myself to express every thought! (Look, I even did it there!) (Are you starting to see what I mean?)

I am utterly incapable of writing succinctly. A rumor at my old high school has it that the instructor of my eleventh-grade AP English Language and Composition class began imposing length limits on his papers because of me. Faced with an assignment to write a four-page paper, I would turn in papers of over ten pages. (Though I might add that these papers always received highest honors—just so it doesn't appear that I turned in ten pages of incoherent rambling to make myself look important.) I never asked him about the veracity of this rumor, but the fact does stand that a length limit magically appeared for his classes the year after I took it. Make of it what you will.

I could describe these tendencies in many flattering ways: I am verbose, loquacious, a windbag. It is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. In a paper for this same English class, I composed a sentence that was 85 words. I remember this mostly due to the horror of the friend who was proof-reading the paper for me. “How could you possibly do that without noticing?” she asked, gobsmacked. I shrugged. “I write the way I talk.” The excuse.

In fact, I'm even getting off track now. To steer us back in the right direction, I provide an example of my tendency to draw out sentences far longer than is acceptable or necessary. The following sentence, lifted from a paper I wrote for English 302 in Spring 2012, made up most of a paragraph and contains a whopping 68 words—a rather excessive amount—though I did have the good sense to stick a semicolon in there at some point, I guess to preserve some degree of my written dignity.

“Lacking the celebratory and optimistic tone of 'Yes We Can,' however, this ad in itself only embodies change insofar as it is discussed briefly, and with no promise of change being made should this team be elected to the presidency; the viewer of the ad is relying merely on the implication that change will come only because McCain and Palin had made changes before in their previous constituencies.”

Reading this sentence again, I realize that not only it is overly long, it barely serves to get my point across. It is clunky and awkward and drags its feet heavily over the page, leaving confusion in its wake. As far as examples of me consistently interrupting myself, just look at this post: at the end of this sentence, there will be 528 words, four dashes, and three different parenthetical interruptions. In only 500-odd words! It's preposterous.

With that said, my goal for this year is to learn to write more succinctly and with less awkward prose. I like to get flowery here and there, but I want my writing to make sense. I also would like to be able to compose my thoughts in such a way that I am interrupting myself less and making points in a more concise and comprehensive way. I hope to also be able to learn to wrap up my writing better—but that may not be a grammar issue. (Five dashes!)