How to Say Nothing in 500 Words

In reading "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words" by Paul Roberts, I found myself quickly shifting between agreeing with Robert's perspective and then disagreeing just as quickly.  Robert's point that often Freshman writer's fail to elaborate on their topic and ever reach any depth, felt very relative to me at this point.  Thus far in my college writings across the board I have felt a lack of depth and a limitation in focus.  On the contrary I feel that my dilemma with reaching this depth is not so much in the category of being due to a desire to quickly reach a word limit as Robert’s suggests, but that I have felt constricted by the word limits.  Because of my personal experiences with writing and the curriculum I was a part of, I often wrote papers and essays that stretched from 1,200 to 2,400 words on a constant basis.  This window left much more room to pick multiple perspectives and points and plenty of time to elaborate on each.  This transition from one type of learning to another made me appreciate Robert’s suggestions on how to create this depth in your writings under a more restricted word limit.  I found value in his suggestions especially on ways of thinking of original topics, specifically the topic he touches on of creating interest in your writing by taking "the less usual side."  Often times it's easy as a writer to choose the most obvious responses to a prompt or to pick a topic that you are most familiar with, but what one often doesn't realize is that this leads to a boring and general paper that will leave much to be desired.