4 ms·
> I don't see what's wrong with the trend of encouraging people not to use 5000 words when 50 would do. If 50 would do. That's rarely the case. Most of the ti
by sheepmullet 11y ago
> I don't see what's wrong with the trend of encouraging people not to use 5000 words when 50 would do.
If 50 would do. That's rarely the case.
Most of the time short articles aren't the result of distilling hundreds of hours of wisdom down to an easily digestible few hundred words.
Instead they are the result of dropping all consideration of context and pushing a simplistic view. Or rushing junk out the door.
An article goes from:
"Given our specific set of circumstances (industry, team size, project size, project makeup, technology stack, turnover, strategic direction, short term goals etc) X is great. We considered alternatives Y and Z but discarded them because of A, B, and C. We ran into issues D and E and were able to do F and G to work around them. We later found we had missed risk H in our analysis but we were lucky enough that it didn't come up.
To:
"X is great. We used it to increase our productivity by 10%."
- SilasX 11y agoI think we're in agreement, in that I would love for articles to look like the first example you gave. In practice, though, they're more like: [long anecdote about someone using not-X that mixes in numerous other factors and is vague on what caused what] [long description about meeting with a subject of the story that painstakingly details their hair, their clothing style, their mannerisms, and the general appearance of the venues] [much more confusing presentation of the paragraph you just gave] Also, when people link the article or recommends it, they will tend to give either no summary, or a clickbait(ier) version of your second example, like, "The miracle of X".
- sheepmullet 11y agoTotally agree. There have always been plenty of crappy articles and simply being long doesn't mean being on point.
- cableshaft 11y agoI.e. just about every article on New Yorker that I've clicked the link for. Ugh, I can't stand that writing style. Please just tell me the relevant information. They should save their justification for all the money they spent on creative writing classes for their short stories that no one will ever read.