I lack conciseness
Concise, succinct, short, brief, to the point, pithy, incisive, short and sweet, crisp, abridged, condensed, compressed, abbreviated, compact, compendious, potted, in a nutshell, epigrammatic, aphoristic, terse, laconic, sparing, snappy, lapidary. I think none of these words could have ever been used for anything I wrote; I have tremendous respect for those who are able to express their thoughts clearly in a few words.
Verbose, wordy, loquacious, garrulous, talkative, voluble, orotund, expansive, babbling, blathering, prattling, prating, jabbering, gushing, effusive, long-winded, lengthy, protracted, prolix, periphrastic, circumlocutory, circuitous, tautological, repetitious, redundant, tortuous, indirect, convoluted; diffuse, discursive, digressive, rambling, wandering, meandering; informalmouthy, gabby, windy, gassy, talky, with the gift of the gab, having kissed the Blarney stone, yakking, big-mouthed; informalwittering, gobby; raremultiloquent, multiloquous, ambagious, logorrhoeic, pleonastic - now that's my style!
And as you probably noticed by now, I'm being super-verbose in this post too. Did I have to write out all the possible synonyms of concise and verbose? No, absolutely not. Did I have to quote a dictioneary definition of concise? Most certainly not. Everything up to this point, including this paragraph, could have been summed up as "I'm gonna write about conciseness because my writing style is verbose"
, but instead of leaving it at that I'm still yabbering, and yes, I do see the irony in me dragging out this sentence even more then it sohuld be needed, but - and this is the crux - I can't do anything but this! I am literally not able to be to the point, or to self-edit.
This has been a major fault in my writing (and - to a slightly lesser degree - also to my ... oratory non-skills) since I first started scribbbling some nearly-illegible characters on lined paper in primary school. I could go on explaining various probable causes for my very generous handling of words (from wanting to be precise to to being glad that finally somebody is gonna listen/read, I wrote 3 paragraphs about it - and decided to edit them out. See? Progress!), but that's won't help anyone, on the contrary: It might put off those poor souls who are still reading at this point.
Back to the topic: although I value long-form text when reading, and exhaustive and precise expression demands verbosity, I myself am unwilling to read what I wrote most of the time, because my constant sidetracking, my nested nested sentences, my endless lists and questions, .... it makes it really hard to keep focused and interested. To make things worse: most of the time what y'all are reading is already a very heavilly edited version of my original drafts (at this point this post has 514 words, in my original draft when I was at this point it had over 1300). I already feel like my posts, my comments, everything I write is lacking something because I had to remove parts, or sum them up, or just imply them.
Here on the blog this lenght - even after editing - is still marginally acceptable, but in other places it's really counter-productive: when I reply to Facebook comments with pages of content, when I post tweet storm chains, when I send multi-screen messages in Signal, ... my ranting not only is bad style, but it makes people not want to read my text, it makes them not take it seriously, and it paints me as arrogant and ... I don't know, elitist? (Side-note: even though I'd like to think of me as very eloquent, my restricted vocabulary is certainly part of the reason for my verboseness too). As I already wrote in the post about starting a blog, I tend to rant at lengths during discussions both online and offline, and one of the reasons why I started this blog is to colelct them here, wrtie them down, and publish them in a clear and presentable way. But you have no idea how many posts I started writing but then deleted because the length was getting out of hand and I really didn't want to make somebody waste so much time just to read what I spewed out.
EDIT:and this is the place where I deleted a bunch of very long paragraphs where I was just whining and ranting even more about how verbose I am. Let's jsut skip right over that and get to the point.
EDIT 2: I worked on this post for ... over half a year, but I decided to delete most of it. It was unnecessarily verbose, and filled with silly non-content.
To sum up what I wanted to say: I need to write more, and edit more agressively. Because having unread endlless walls of text stored on some server helps nobody, and least of all me. If I want to grow as a comunicator, as a writer, - as a person! -, I really need to prcatice more. Even though in this post I'm talking about writing and editing (and, to a lesser degree, speaking), this holds true for most aspects of my life. I need to practice more.
And practice I shall. Expect more posts soon. Hopefully, they will be to the point.