I was really motivated by the February 18 reading "Concision". I started to analyze my writing in a whole new perspective. I have been told that my writing often gets too wordy, but I never imagined how damaging it was to my work's content. I think I have always tried to work more "poetics" or "flower" into my language because I thought that it made the work better. Let me tell you, the flowers had too much mulch on them. The relationship between a truck and the drag of its load was all too true. My writing was trying pull the Titanic back up for a maiden voyage, and its clarity was about as successful.

I decided to really burn off the linguistic "fat" in my essay. When we were assigned to enhance the conciseness of our papers in class, I found I took more time to judge my piece than anyone else. I had created the Guinness Book of World Records
newest addition. My paper was grossly bloated with meaningless words,double wording, inference adjectives and adverbs, and a host of other troubles. After two hours of laboring, I had a completely different paper in my hands. But, that was not the end of it, I reworded and deleted even more when I retyped my revisions. I finally figured out the best writers are those who are never satisfyed. A good writer is one who can look at a piece they have published, after tolling over it for months or even years, and say "I should have done ____." You have to understand that learning to write is a continually process that, if you are good at, will be a wonderful, if somewhat overwhelming, aspect. We never do, after all, learn how to do anything perfectly.

Now, I know that the idea of never being finished with what you write is a rather ogreish prospect, but grammar is not the only revision that should be made. How we communicate our ideas can be infinitely critiqued, but eventually the grammar issue has to give way to the expression of ideas "publishing". However, these ideas can also be critiqued. A good writer should review a past work with the same critique as any of their readers. Through time, our perspectives change and grow with every new idea that is presented to use. In a way, a past writing is written by an author who only exists in the time and space of the writing process. Looking at our past perspectives should be an eye opening experience for us, because our new perspectives gives us the ability to better our future writing and, gratefully, ourselves.