Finally I have reduced my reflective paper to within the word limit - indeed, I am even 43 words inside it.  Miracle of miracles.  Time for minor celebrations.

So, how was this done?  Not by shaprening arguments or choosing clever words but by radically editting from a 'journal' (personal variety) format to an essay with footnotes & references and by excising whole chunks of material.  It is now around 40% shorter than it began.

Whilst I completely understand why the academy needs word counts, personal reflective journals don't fit such a mandate... especially for waffle merchants like me.  There is something 'not right' that it has taken at least twice as long to edit the entries down to size as it did to write them in the first place.  I am far from convinced that the 60 plus hours this exercise has involved is justified for half of the submission for an undergraduate module.  This probably says far more about me than about the expectations of the course.

So, now 'all' that paper needs is for me to tidy up its referencing (hurrah for Endnote!) and then I can write the second, even shorter, essay...

Sometimes I think it must be nice to be a minimalist...