The babbling of the brook

My grad-school professors have told me that my technical writing is too wordy and that I talk too much about the "wind in the trees". They say I need to be more specific, more concrete, more focused on the scientifically significant details. Perhaps what I need to do is get the wind in the trees out of my system. So here goes:

During the development of Micro/Meso-Scale Machine Tools, it is important to consider the behavior and the balance of the entire system, in much the same way that Thoreau pondered the world while he was at Walden Pond. The movement of the CNC machine should be smooth and fluid, like the behavior of water in a brook at it swirls and flows past old moss-covered stones and water-logged tree branches. The water and the stones and the branches adapt to one another over time, the water shapes the stones and the water moves the branches just the same as the stones and the branches change the course of the water. A branch might come to rest against a stone, with the cylindrical shape of the branch and the gentle face of the stone creating two small protected areas where the two touch. The water's endless journey, the constant pull of gravity, reaching a soft lull in the eddies formed in the space between the branch and the stone. Perhaps in that place a snail finds refuge and lays her eggs, with her endless toil and search for food momentarily suspended as she gives the next generation of critters their chance at the dance of life.

In the same way, the motors and the bearings and the position encoders and the structural components of the CNC machine must coexist. Their designs interacting, their shapes and sizes affecting each other until a harmony is found. Every piece in its right place. Then, as the electrons course through the copper wires, the machine begins its own digital dance, begins its own toil, eventually creating its own offspring in the form of pieces and parts, widgits and gadgets, cogs and wheels. The CNC machine's offspring no less glorious than their mother, perhaps being assembled into a wizardly surgical device that helps restart the heart of an old man, his own blood again pulsing through his veins.

Ahhh.