40 X 15 = 600

By Andy Young

I never really know what I’m going to write each week for The Windham Eagle.

Sometimes I start with one idea but then head off in an entirely different direction.

Often life presents a topic, like last winter when a snowplow hit my car.

At other times a random thought will cross my mind, and it’ll get me started.

The ability to play with words and/or numbers helps when producing a cogent 600-word column.

Over the years I’ve gotten plenty of writing advice from a variety of distinguished mentors.

For example, a veteran editor told me to never write essays of over 800 words.

“Nobody wants to read more than 800 words about anything you can name,” she said.

And after many years of experience, I have to say I believe she was right.

Although given the attention spans of current readers, 400 words might be more like it.

Or, thanks to soulless social media influencers and avaricious cellphone purveyors, perhaps 200 would suffice.

After thoughtful consideration I decided to write exactly 600 words for The Windham Eagle each week.

And that’s what I’ve done for the past five years, week in and week out.

But what is the most effective method of writing thoughtful, meaningful, amusing, or inspiring essays?

Some folks say the best way of learning to do something is actually doing it.

And for the most part I agree, although obviously there are exceptions to every rule.

I have heard that for some people, formal education is more important than hands-on experience.

My best guess is that people who maintain that belief are most likely professional educators.

Or “educated idiots,” as my supervisor at the apple orchard, an 8th-grade dropout, enjoyed saying.

I wasn’t exactly the greatest at academics, but some random lessons somehow stuck with me.

Today a kid like me would be diagnosed with “oppositional-defiant disorder,” or some such thing.

But that wouldn’t have been entirely accurate in my case, since I wasn’t ever defiant.

Oppositional maybe, but defiance most definitely wasn’t a viable option when I went to school.

However, I may have shown a bit of passive-aggressive oppositional behavior from time to time.

If adults told me I couldn’t accomplish something, I’d do it just to spite them.

A well-meaning teacher once told me to vary the length of the sentences I wrote.

“Too many short sentences make your writing sound too simple, and too boring,” she intoned.

She also cautioned me against constructing overly lengthy sentences that contained too many multisyllabic words.

“Overlong sentences and pretentious verbiage turn readers off,” she sagely advised, and naturally I agreed.

I should have listened more carefully to most of the teachers I had back then.

But because I was an immature adolescent boy as a high schooler, I did not.

Funny, because now that I think of it, “immature adolescent boy” is a classic redundancy.

There were only three boys in my entire high school class who weren’t immature adolescents.

And naturally those three exceptions were unfairly (and unmercifully) tormented by the rest of us.

However, that was then, this is now, and the subject at hand is essay writing.

Nobody would recommend authoring an essay where every sentence contained the same number of words.

Or even worse, a 40-paragraph, 40-sentence essay, with each sentence consisting of exactly 15 words.

“Writing something like that is impossible!” they’d insist, adding, “Besides, who’d want to read it?”

I admit, I’m not quite sure who’d really want to read 40 consecutive 15-word sentences.

But after finishing this column, I know for certain that writing one is indeed possible! <