4 ms·

I've found following Strunk's "make every word count" dictum causes me to take much more time when composing. So 4-8 pages per week sounds like it would take an

• munchbunny 6y ago
  It absolutely did, but it was focused practice, so it gave you back what you put into it. I got better over time, so by the end of the class I was much faster at the process of putting the words down and then making multiple passes to clean it up.
• mwcremer 6y ago
  Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. --B.Pascal (I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.)
  • njarboe 6y ago
    This was especially true when everything was written out by hand. Editing on a computer changes the time to rewrite something by at least a factor of 10, maybe 100.
    • sokoloff 6y ago
      Based on writing I read professionally, I’m not sure that people are regularly re-reading what they’ve re-written.
• throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  It's something I aspire to[0] and as elsewhere pointed out, it takes extra time. As your expected audience grows, the value of your time invested grows because it benefits proportionately more people. I've learned to explain in terms almost stupidly simple because another's interpretation can be so extraordinarily far from your intent you wonder how they even got there. Then they explain how it reads to them, and inside you groan a little because yes, it could be seen to mean that and you had no idea. One needs to user test one's writings just as much as one's software, I've discovered. [0] WIP