I like to count things. I recently went through all my writings from the past quarter of a century to try to count how many words I have written. A lot, that’s how many. Which is a quite restrained way of saying more than twenty million.
I have always tended to write too much. At first, teachers thought this admirable. I then started to receive warnings about running out of time during exams. At university, keeping to the word count was considered part of the discipline of selecting, evaluating, and ordering material. So I became obsessed with counting every word. During my time in PhD research, I would put a word count in the top right hand corner of very report I submitted. My Director of Studies pleaded with me to desist in the end, asking me to imagine how dispiriting it was for him to pick up a compact pack of papers from me, telling him exactly how much reading he had in front of him. He claimed that it was very intimidating and frankly off-putting. I continued to count, even if I stopped putting the number of words on the front of the documents I submitted. I guess it's a very AS thing to be doing.
