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


You know what's the most ironic thing? I've *done* this. I went through this whole process when working on my school newspaper, and got it pretty fast, too; my teacher complimented me on how quickly I adjusted.

The problem was that I *unadjusted* fairly quickly when I left the paper. Maybe I shouldn't've. :(

Ar"bad habits die hard"thur