holy shit, the glossary

I've been working on my book's glossary of terms, and it's taking longer than I expected because I'm writing rather editorialized definitions of terms and concepts, sometimes discussing them in greater depth than I did in the main text. I've done the book's front matter, but after I finish the glossary, I still need to work on the back-end stuff: the book’s acknowledgments and bio pages. I don't think I need to paginate the ms for the .epub version of this book (e-book software does that automatically; on an e-book, pages vary according to factors like screen size and font size), but I will paginate for the dead-tree version. (I wonder if I can use the .epub software to vary the style of auto-pagination for the e-book version: I want the introduction to have lower-case Roman numerals—i, ii, iii, iv—for its pagination. I'd also like to avoid paginating the title and back-cover pages.) Having two versions of the book also means I have to use two ISBNs, which sucks. I sense I'm going to blow through my batch of 10 ISBNs pretty quickly. Here's a sample glossary entry:

multiple-choice testing (n.)  Testing in which the student encounters questions whose answers are a list of (usually) four or five alternatives, one of which is generally the best (although 2-answer questions and “pick all that apply” questions are also possible). Before a major change in 2016, the American SAT was heavy with multiple-choice questions. Now, more questions on the new SAT are of the fill-in-the-blank variety. My chapter on testing lists reasons why I’m not a fan of multiple-choice questions; you are free to disagree if you think you can formulate good questions in a clever way that exercises the kids’ brains, but you will never totally eliminate the guessing factor: in theory, any student can guess his or her way through an entire test. To me, this is a major strike against multiple-choice testing.

I'm defining a lot of terms, and with many of my definitions running at least as long as the one shown above, this is taking a while, almost as if I were rewriting the book. Writing the glossary is enjoyable, but kind of a slog. I can hear my boss's voice in my head, telling me to cut 90% of the verbiage and to express myself more economically. My boss prefers a very terse, spare, get-to-the-point writing style; his main complaint with my work is that I'm prolix and sesquipedalian (wordy and given to using big, fancy words)—not good for the little kids we're writing for. Well, he doesn't have any say in how I write this book, so there.