I am a verbose person. I struggle with word counts and page limits. I've come to the realization as I've been writing my thesis proposal that part of the reason for this is that I write ridiculous numbers of explanatory notes. I'm constantly trying to clarify, to make things crystallize into a beautiful and clear diamond of meaning. Unfortunately, I usually just end up being wordy and therefore obscuring the point even more than if I hadn't tried to explain it. I'm in the home stretch with the proposal, but, surprise surprise, I'm over the page limit. Not by a lot. It's only four lines of text. Excising is always the hardest part of the editing process though. It requires you to be ruthless with your own work. And I find that it is harder the less I have to edit out. I can slash and hack, getting rid of whole paragraphs much more easily than I can carefully make tiny incisions to trim the text back one or two sentences. It's almost there. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
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