V is for...Verbosity

Thanks to everyone who commented on yesterday's blog post. I was feeling a little bit sorry for myself, and it was nice to have people be nice to me rather than tell me to 'shut up you moany old bint.' I'm still the same physically as I was yesterday, except for the fact that I've gotten over myself and am in a more accepting frame of mind. I'll be fine.

Anyway, I've started to notice a worrying trend. I am becoming more verbose. Not as verbose as Polonius in Hamlet but still pretty impressive.

The thing was, in college I was always the one who came in under word count. I used to hear about crazy people (in fact, I married one) who would burst through the word limit and hand in assignments that were substantially longer than the guidelines. For me, brevity was what was important. I outlined my argument, made my case, concluded and still with a sizeable (admittedly, sometimes too sizeable) amount of words to spare. I managed to get decent grades, both in my primary degree and in my master's, so it was all gravy. Occasionally I worried about the shortness of my essays, but mostly I spent my spare time in college daydreaming about the stories I would write when I went and got a bit of self-discipline for myself. My journalism.articles were tighter to word count, because they had to be, but my the first draft of my first novel came to 40,000 words. It's now at 70,000.

But over time, my writing has evolved and I now find that my writing is in fact too long. My books are getting longer, my blog posts could do with being more concise, and I have now turned into one of those crazy people.

What about all of you? Has your writing got more concise or more verbose?