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Succinctness is important and I think your middle example is actually a much better sentence than the original, while retaining the same information (even if it
by scandox 10y ago
Succinctness is important and I think your middle example is actually a much better sentence than the original, while retaining the same information (even if it should say "the device's appearance" or "the appearance of the device".
However, I think length is not the key to how long a book takes to read. There are 600 page books I could read in a week. There are 100 page books that take weeks to read.
There are books that are too dense: Sometimes a slightly rambling, digressive style can give the mind space in which to reflect. If every sentence hits us with another dense thought, our mind tires quickly.
Also consider this: writing succinctly is hard work. Perhaps the author didn't have time to work on making every thought pithy and still expressive.
- dorfsmay 10y agoSome of us are slow readers, and just reading the raw amount of words is a limitation, even before we get into how difficult it is to understand.
- forgetsusername 10y agoExactly. Writing well isn't about listing facts. It's an art. That's not to say works can't be overwrought. Buts it's also not to say that long needs to be short.
- choosername 10y agoright, writing's about the useful order of the facts.
- stared 10y agoSure, some books are too dense. But honestly, I've only met such in mathematics and theoretical physics.
- dredmorbius 10y agoI've bumped into books (and other writing) where there's simply far too much chewing to get to a bloody point. Every passage has some lengthy aside about irrelevent matters. Often personal bit. The late 1990s / early 2000s highly padded tech texts were the worst for this. Que is an imprint that comes to mind, and many of the "24 hours" type books. O'Reilly and No Starch were usually (though not always) better. The old AT&T Unix classics are the opposite: concise, clear, and highly useful. Vendor docs are often the wworst -- simply repeating descriptions already apparent from interfaces or systems whilst providing no insight whatsoever to how the tool is used as a system. The problems this causes are at least threefold: 1. The documentation is ineffective. It doesn't convey useful information. 2. If you're trying to find useful passages, yo've got to chew through far too much crud. 3. The books are huge and heavy. Carrying one means foregoing two or three other (useful) books. And they simply weigh too damned much. I suspect crowding out other books for shelf space was part of the strategy.