By: Jerod Buchler
Yes, it is very important to meet a word count to get a work accepted, but once you meet that word count then you must be concise enough to not bore the reader. To such a point where the editor will not even finish reading it. When writing for school we are taught to do everything in our power to meet that word count even if that means sacrificing the quality of that work. That is a stigma that we need to cut through because as someone who will possibly need to read through these works if I end up getting lost in all of the useless words, I will give up on it and dismiss it entirely. When I give up on it entirely, then I will vote it out of the magazine.
So when I tell you that I don’t want to see phrases in your writing like, “as follows,” or even things like, “what I was saying earlier,” I mean it, because that is the stuff that takes away from good writing and makes it bad. Those are the phrases that make the whole piece tears apart at the seams. When these writings are too lengthy, they get boring, then whatever you had to say just gets thrown out the window, because no one can get through it. I would say that the crucial thing to remember about writing with a word count is to not add things just for that word count add things that mean something for the writing even if that takes you longer to think about and come up with. So instead of writing something and focusing on the word count of it write something that you care about and the word count will follow, and you won’t have to worry about it. The biggest example that I can give about writing about something that you care about is take something that comes from the heart and write about that and there will never be a shortage of words needed to fill up that count. If you write something just to get some sort of response from people than there is a good chance that you will just wrack your brain trying to squeeze out enough words to make a word count.