500 Words or Less

I can write a killer paper. Being able to take a topic and write it into whatever length it needed to be, was always very helpful to me in college, and helped me breathe easy through many a writing assignment. But I don't believe that the ability to write many words is a true mark of a good writer. Anyone can write profusely, but it takes practice to precisely. I believe that a good writer, even though he may have the ability to use many words, also knows how to be just as precise with less. A good writer, I think, knows how to put her words on a budget and be considerate of her readers.

As a reader, the first thing I do when I glance at an article is scan it for its length, and quickly analyze the complexity of the language.  I've passed over many a good essay or article because of excessive length or extra wordiness. So, when I began writing, I gave myself a goal. It is a goal that I still stretch to reach every time I set my pen to paper or my fingers to a keyboard. My writing goal is to always to say what I mean to say as clearly as possible with as few words as possible.

When I first started writing, I was just writing in my own personal journal. So, I didn't try too hard to be concise, but as I looked back on the pages and pages of thoughts that I had written, I realized that I could say what was saying in a lot fewer words. So, when I started writing my blog about three years ago, something that I knew at least a few people might read, I gave myself an extra challenge.

More to challenge myself than anything else, I decided on the goal of keeping every post to 500 words or less. Sometimes I don't meet that goal, and go well beyond my 500 word budget, and other times I can barely come up with a sentence. But I love to exercise my brain, and 500 words is quite a stretch for a wordy girl like me.

I certainly don't claim to be a good writer, but I do aspire to be a better one, and keeping it short is how I try to do it. I've never had a problem finding words, but I do have trouble remembering not to use ALL of them. So, my challenge to myself is to keep my writing down to 500 words or less.