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Indeed, concise it wasn't. So much filler text such as "With this in mind," "To illustrate," This: "One might speculate that people play Farmville precisely b
by apphacker 16y ago
Indeed, concise it wasn't. So much filler text such as "With this in mind," "To illustrate,"
This:
"One might speculate that people play Farmville precisely because they invest physical effort and in-game profit into each harvest."
could have been:
"People may play Farmville because they invest effort and in-game profit into each harvest."
It is a horribly written article. Those extra adjectives all over the place offer absolutely nothing. One might speculate that if the comments here on this site - Hacker News - were written deliberately with such very many adjectives, punctuated through out each paragraph and sentence, you may imagine that perhaps one would precisely spend an entire laborious day completing in the end simply a singular article within that languishing timeframe.
- adriand 16y agoI thought it flowed very nicely and had a thoughtful, conversational tone. Taken farther, your desire for concision would eventually bring us to a list of Powerpoint bullets. This style of writing and speaking encourages reflection. When he says "One might speculate", his audience is encouraged to speculate themselves, to question his point, or to ponder if there are perhaps other reasons for why people play. Your revised sentence is dry and scientific, it says, "here's why, period, no need to keep thinking about it."
- jshen 16y agowhat did the howard zinn paragraphs add that justified the space? How many paragraphs did it take to even get to farmville?
- c0riander 16y agoThe beginning of the essay makes it clear that "This essay was given as a talk at SUNY Buffalo, 28 January 2010, the day after Howard Zinn’s death. I have left the text unaltered, to better reflect the spirit of the talk." So to the audience at the time, the paragraphs were a timely hook that contextualized the idea within a relevant current event. Also, though they're not as well integrated as they could be (perhaps we can forgive the author that one, given that the talk was the day after Zinn's death, so it was a pretty quick addition I'm guessing), they tie back into the overall idea that a democratic society suffers from this kind of gameplay.
- jshen 16y agoI understand, and I'm not trying to be a hard ass. It's just that the internet has caused a giant flood of information, and one way I'm trying to cope is to prefer/choose concise and efficient expression. This means that I tend to stop reading or watching if a piece of content seems to take a while to get to the core of it's point.
- apphacker 16y agoIt was ridiculous. If someone wants to encourage reflection they should simply say that instead of inundate their writing with unnecessary words. Words are meant to convey information, and what interests me as a reader are not thoughtful conversational tones. I prefer an executive summary with the option to delve deeper into areas I find interesting. This instead read like a freshman's first English Literature essay.
- alan-crowe 16y agoThe subjunctive prelude "One might speculate..." signposts the structure at the dozen paragraph scale. The author is both wondering why people play Farmville and providing a description for those unfamiliar with it. He works through a list of hypotheses, stating them and describing the features of Farmville that leads him to reject them. The proposed alternative sentence is neither informative nor structural. "People may play Farmville because ..." is uninformative; we were hoping to be informed that "People do play Farmville because ..." or that "People do not play Farmville because ...". Nor does the sentence help the text flow. It is like encountering an if statement while reading code. Now there are two paths to follow, may and may not. The sentence imposes a cognitive load on the reader, but for no reason. The author is about to explain why not.