I remember doing a paper for a supervisor who wanted 500 words on a subject. I started writing and didn’t realize I had written about 600 words before even getting a good head of steam up.
I really need to get a new job.
It can take a long time to write something short. Blaise Pascal made that observation a long time ago.
“I remember doing a paper for a supervisor who wanted 500 words on a subject. I started writing and didn’t realize I had written about 600 words before even getting a good head of steam up.”
LOL. Now you’ve set me off on an Old Law School Story (Don’t worry, no obscenity or even grossness, unlike Old Fraternity Stories). In freshman year we had a legal writing course where we wrote moot court briefs and argued an appellate case. Our briefs were limited to ten pages. When I finished mine I discovered it was about 10.5 pages and couldn’t be easily rewritten down to the proper size.
Then I had an inspiration. I’d typed my brief using a typewriter that typed ten characters per inch. The rule was ten pages, but didn’t specify the number of characters per inch. So, I sat down, remembered my old high school algebra, calculated how many pages I’d come up with at 12 characters per inch, and discovered the brief would make the 10 page minimum if typed at 12 characters per inch. Then I borrowed a 12 character per inch typewriter from a fraternity brother, typed my final version of the brief with that machine, and made the page limitation. I’ve always been proud of that because I demonstrated a valuable talent for lawyer—finding a good loophole.