2 ms·
> By putting it into words, you have said "this is important enough to actually say it." But you have not said this is important enough for you to read, right
by MaulingMonkey 10y ago
> By putting it into words, you have said "this is important enough to actually say it."
But you have not said this is important enough for you to read, right now, nor especially important enough to remember every detail. If everything written were important to read, we'd spend our lifetimes failing to work through the backlog - of every word ever written since the dawn of writing. There are key points to remember, and then supporting facts to be forgotten after they've done their job of arguing for those key points, and this language emphasizes their key points (in defense of Tesla, naturally, rather than the mundane statistics.)
> Further saying that it is important is a crutch.
Perhaps. But remember - crutches are legitimate medical devices built to serve a need, they have purpose! I tend to use the terser "IMPORTANT:", "NOTE WELL:", "N.B.:"[1], "NOTE:", etc. to call attention to high priority stuff. I'll especially use this style of emphasis in code, where I can't make my text bold, underlined, large-fonted, red, blinking for emphasis, embedded into a modal dialog you can't dismiss for the first 10 seconds, just to make sure you read the damn thing. These are the notes I deem to have e.g. a 100:1 time saved/spent ratio, where I need my fellow programmers to stop skimming as a thousand inane comments before have perhaps trained them to do, and to instead save us all a lot of time and energy by reading the important thing.
But being that terse in a press release like this would come across as incredibly tone deaf and insensitive. Try replacing "It is important to emphasize that" with "NOTE:" and "It is important to note that" with "IMPORTANT:". The paragraphs themselves might read fine, but in the broader context of the press release it'd be cringe worthy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nota_bene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nota_bene
- hellofunk 10y ago> Try replacing "It is important to emphasize that" with "NOTE:" and "It is important to note that" with "IMPORTANT:". That would be an equal problem as the original and not how a good writer should solve the wording. Compare this to, for example, the press releases by a major news organization when it admits it got something important quite wrong. There are many ways to use our language as it was designed without getting meta.