> > > Ar"hey, this post was kind of shorter than the others; or am I just being paranoid now? It feels like freshman English again, trying to pare down to length requirements; [snip] "thur
> >
> > This thought is totally alien to me. I have never before heard of anyone doing anything but the opposite, trying to expand and expand their writing to meet the minimum requirements. I've also never had a teacher give a maximum limit on writings...
> >
> > gabby
>
>
> I guess I'm special, then. :) Any teacher who has me in a class finds herself attaching maximum length requirements pretty fast... For the narcissistic, adding is the easy part. It's subtracting our own immortal prose we find physically painful.

My mom is like you, Arthur, in that she had to cut term papers in half when she was in college. I, on the other hand, am the one who is going through the paper, adding two more words to a sentence to get the paragraph to stretch to the next line. My mom had a hard time understanding my struggle to reach a minimum number of pages, so I imagine you have a hard time with that, too.

Here's my suggestion: Since you've said that you have extra time now that summer break is here, try setting a maximum word count for yourself. (If you have Word, you can check the word count in the Tools menu.) Type your forum response in a word processing program and do NOT let yourself go over that limit. Set the limit low and challenge yourself.

If you're having extreme amounts of trouble with this, a journalism technique might work. When writing a news story, the "lead" is the first sentence. It's generally not more than 25 words and it covers the who, what, when, where and why. People struggle with this, but I tell them, "Verbally sum up the whole story for me right now." They do so, and I almost always say, "There you go; that's your lead." See if this works for you. Figure out what main ideas you want to get across in your forum post and sum them all up into one 25-word sentence. That way, if someone goes no further than your first sentence, you will have still made your point.

Granted, this message forum is not a newspaper, and neither does it have a specific word count. However, these exercises might be interesting for you, and it might help people read (rather than lightly skim) your thoughtful forum posts.

Ell"This was probably a long post, come to think of it"myruh