Just Another Intro

Hey Hey, it’s that time of the day. TiTi Talks is back to you all with a different kind of topic today. On this day, I’m not just coming to you as your favorite blog buddy but instead as a student. Now I know that school, the university specifically, is such a downer topic compared to the fun that we usually have but I promise there is something that some, if not most of you can relate to. So buckle up! I first want to start with the concept of being concise.

By dictionary definition, concise means; giving a lot of information clearly and in a few words; brief but comprehensive. Now, these 14 words, for this one sentence make being concise sound easy, almost habitual, but how is a person even supposed to do that? What are the few words that I should choose out of my mind to say? These were always questions that no teacher or English instructor could seem to fully answer for me, and when they attempted to, it seemed to be way more confusing.

So, since the situation was obviously proving to be a “student-teaching-themselves-because-the teacher can’t-situation” I decided to answer it for myself. I could be my own teacher, I had done it plenty of times, especially with some of these professors. And what better way to document my findings than right here with some people who may or may not be in a similar situation?!

To give you a backstory, this topic came to me one day while reading a book. Yes, reading an actual book with paper and ink, which is something so unfortunately foreign to our generation. Anyway, this book, in particular, had so many words that I began to get overwhelmed and wanted to stop reading because the agony of having to take in so much information and words at a time was headache-worthy at that moment. But, it gave me a sense of odd nostalgia for my early years in academic writing. Specifically, it reminded me of how my teachers used to feel when they would read my essays.

Starting as early as middle school, my teachers always told me that I wrote “too much,” Whenever I would get those rough drafts handed back to me, there would be quite a few red ink swords puncturing right through not only words but sentences. Or there would be the occasional, “Too many run-on sentences” or “Be more concise” comment. I would even be told that my excessive writing was practically me writing books. At first, I was utterly flabbergasted by the feedback I was receiving. I was almost even offended that they would dismiss so much of my hard-earned thinking that I had just beautifully transferred to the paper. Wasn’t that what these people wanted? Didn’t they ask me to write all these paragraphs on all these pages? Isn’t writing books a good thing that writers make a career out of and get paid for? Then I realized what they were saying. They weren’t trying to say that the content of my work was the problem, but that my delivery of it was forcing me to work harder and not smarter. I started to realize and notice that though I had a lot to say, I didn’t have to say all of it in order to get my point across.

Therefore, I needed to find a way to be concise that not only satisfied the lengthy page and paragraph requirements but also a way that still allowed me to deliver my claim using quality rather than quantity. After all, I didn’t want my audience to feel how I felt reading something that was so long that it deterred me from actually doing the reading.

So I began a quest to discover what exactly would help me not to talk as much as I do in real life, within my essays. My first stop was to the library for books. So cool I know but I wanted to discover the basics because I knew that it would take baby steps to become the concise writer that my past teachers and I wanted me to be. Next, I turned to interview my peers who are students as well so that I could discover what some of their own tactics were when it came to being concise. And surprisingly I found that I wasn’t the only one who had struggled with this issue.

This brings me to you all. I know some of you readers, or at least one of you, have experienced a similar problem with being concise within your essays, or just difficulty finding just the right amount to write about. So from my Indiana Jones Quest to Concise writing, I gathered up a few gems of useful strategies for us all to utilize in our next writing assignment. This way, not only will you be getting a good grade, but your piece will be bedazzled with the tactics of a true concise writer.