I feel your pain, m'dear. We're taught to be well-read and sophisticated in our interpretations and to share them with scholars for four years and then we face The World.

Something is lost, to be sure, but I find comfort in finding ways to draw the public into one "deep reference" or metaphor or anecdote. It assuages the English monster within and adds color to a piece. Don't be confined by the idea of just "sticking to the point." It's actually quite a challenge to stare down eloquence, particularly when we have limitless blog space to post an entire argument in all its complexity.

I know what you're going through, and if you'd like to start a support group, I'll be first in line.

Let's start a club. We could get jackets.

;)

My first blog entry for my internship included a lengthy defense of the free market. Our communications director looked at me blankly.

"We just needed you to talk about how many people came to the event and how excited they were for Social Security reform," he told me.

The blog entry went up on our website heavily edited, and I'm learning to rein myself in. I suppose you and I will both have to wait for our future publishing contracts to write the way we want. *sigh*v

In college, you always got *some* points for being impressive, even if you had to go a little off topic.

I'm actually having a similar problem writing a report for Dr. Spurlock -- I'm throwing in four times as much detail as necessary. So I just gave him the first section, asked him to cut what he didn't want and circle what he wanted, and I'll complete the document with his guidance.

Sigh. Thanks for commiserating, everyone. I suppose passion gets in the way of "just the facts, ma'am" every once in awhile.

Megan, I drool at the thought of future publishing possibilities...

And Dr. Jerz, I admit that I'm not entirely sure what you meant by saying about points for going off topic but being impressive... Is that pointing at the fact that I'm not earning anything except a paycheck for being semi-unimpressive but on-task?

In creative writing, the cliche advice is: "Kill your darlings." The readers' needs are almost always more important than our own. Tough lesson to learn, however, because we don't want to feel like sell-outs or slaves doing what we do for inauthentic purposes. I'm not convinced I've even learned that lesson, though it's true I have become merciless to 'my darlings.'

I like Dr. Jerz' advice (though I kind of disagree with his example): The less work your editor has to do for you, the more successful you'll be as a writer.

Hang in there, Karissa and keep up the good literate work.

Karissa, the criteria for being "impressive" in the business world often translates to something like "making your boss's job easier."

When a student in one of my classes writes a paper that refers to a work that wasn't on the syllabus, and something I haven't read, that generally means more work for me (depending on the kind of assignment and the importance of that outside text to the student's argument).

I wouldn't dream of telling the student to pick a less ambitious thesis statement, since my job is not to oversee the production of literary analysis papers (like the foreman in an essay-production factory), but rather to teach critical thinking and writing, and the papers are the instrument that I use to measure how well students can do what they're supposed to be learning.

But if I were the editor of a model railroad hobbyist magazine, I would know my audience very well, and I would know whether they would want to read a 500-word digression on the images of technology as pastoral interlude Thomas the Tank Engine. As a teacher in a class on cultural responses to the industrial revolution, I would welcome such a surprising interlude if it were well-written.

By the way, I just added "kill your darlings" to a list of journalism terms... it applies to any genre of writing in which the needs of the audience are more important than the needs of the writer.