Everyone knows that someone whose mouth is like a running faucet. Wherever they go, whoever they're with, no matter what situation presents itself, these people talk and talk and talk and keep talking to the point where you figure that perhaps this person's respiratory system is configured such that they need to exhale to live, rather than inhale. While I am not one of these people I seem to suffer from the same type of affliction when it comes to my writing. I am too verbose. Too wordy. Too excessive in my writing, using too many words and too many sentences to convey a simple thought. I don't just say it once, make my point and move on.
I guess I've been verbose since I started writing. I remember back in elementary school when we'd have essay tests the teachers would let me stay after school to finish my essays, as I'd quickly run out of room in the little space given, and fill, literally, pages. Despite my abundance of writing, I never realized I was verbose, that others wrote less or conveyed more with less effort. It wasn't until my sophomore year in high school, when a teacher's sole comment on a writing assignmnet was, “Too verbose.”
Nothing hammers home the point of my verbosity affliction than when I write articles for the ASP.NET Dev Center. My poor editor, Kent Sharkey, usually asks for x 2,000 word articles and y 4,000 word articles, and I typically deliver y 6,000 to 8,000 word articles. I profusely apologize to the poor soul at Microsoft who has to copy edit my MSDN articles. My heart goes out to you.