The Importance of Being Concise

This idea hit me like a brick just now...

When I first started at DePaul nearly three years ago, my resume was four pages long. Four pages! Clearly, a college junior hadn’t done that much in her life up until to deserve such a lengthy resume, right? Well I felt I had. I insisted on listing every damn thing I did since I entered college – and even had some stuff on there I was involved in as early as 7^th grade. Yikes. No wonder the best I could do was flipping ice cream for a living.

Although my four page resume was a low point in my career as a writer, I’ve always have a problem with being too wordy. I remember in 4^th grade, I failed a writing assignment because I had written two pages when the assignment only called for one. I was too upset! I could not understand why my teacher wanted to fail me for going beyond her expectations, when the other kids were “very, very, very-ing” their way to a full page.

It was a learning experience that would soon come full circle. What my 4^th grade teacher was trying to instill in me was the importance of being concise. Not just in writing, but in life, too. Get to the point. Don’t beat around the bush. Be straightforward and say what you mean. Most of the time, the stuff you say leading up to your point has no real place or meaning in your argument – think about it. Its just saying more stuff to introduce the stuff you’re eventually going to say. Conciseness is not a gift, but a skill, one that must be worked on and honed in order to completely settle upon.

I had to learn the hard way. After fourth grade, I started writing poetry.

-Jay