The Birth of a New & Improved Writer

After reading the excerpts on Strunk & White's writing guide The Elements of Style, I realized that I may have made every mistake that Strunk and White described in the chapter "An Approach to Style". Lately I've been noticing that I've become accustomed to writing with an overabundance of words, the reason for this being that I enjoy words and often want to wrap my sentences up in the prettiest little bow, hoping that someone will want to unwrap the gift I've presented them with. It is very hard for me to cut down my sentences because I always think that each part of it is just as important as the next. However I think that Strunk and White were onto something when they touched on the topic of clarity, and how it is your job as a writer to be clear to your readers, to cause them as little strife in reading your piece as you can. I realize a big part of being clear is by using as little words as you need to.
I still think that having a wide vocabulary at your disposal is useful when writing, and in the right contexts using extra words for emphasis or painting a specific picture can be necessary. But, on the whole, I think that extra words should be used as little as possible because our main purpose is to inform our readers and we don't want our audience to feel as if they had to dig for so long before finding something useful in our writing. It made me laugh when Strunk and White mentioned the phrase "the fact that" and said that it was a phrase that should be "revised out of every sentence in which it occurs" because I know that this is a phrase I use way too often.
I hope after this course that I can learn a little bit more (if not a lot) about myself as a writer and what it will take to bring my writing to the next level. I hope I can learn to be more clear with my writing and how to use words that flow together better instead of just throwing a ton of words down on a page and hoping my reader doesn't notice that I did that in an attempt to distract them from "the fact that" (see I did it again) I didn't know what I was saying.