See my other blog, link right, for more introspection

This is exactly why I will never make a writer. Not the thinking that smart people use big fancy words thing--I know that good writing is simple. I have a problem with the "omit needless words" thing. I just can't express the simplest of thoughts without writing a novel that says almost nothing. A real novel's worth of ideas in my own prose would be encyclopedia-length. "Write as you speak?" Ha, but I'm the person who speaks normally and without thought and daily heard from my friend, "Who USES that word!?" I am overly verbose, and no amount of writing exercise cures this. It did come in handy in high school, though; artful sentences were paragraphs unto themselves (and that was a BIG no-no, of course--I could get away with it through a colorful expression of ideas combined with a creative yet exact use of punctuation that meant that the sentence really did fill out the paragraph's purpose), and I had no trouble filling out X pages, typed and double-spaced--we were required to have ten pages of readers' journal a week in ninth-grade Literature, and mine was nearly always closer to thirty.