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If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)
- krylon 10y agoThis makes me think of a teacher I had in school - he told us we should try to keep our exams to about 600 words. Whereas students in other classes routinely wrote about 2000 words, sometimes 3000. I first disliked him, because he meant business - my first exam with this teacher was about 1100 words, and he explicitly told me he would have given me a better grade if it had been shorter. (Boy, was I mad!) But in time, I came to appreciate this attitude, because it forced me to really think about what I wanted to say and how to say it. And I suppose that is what Pascal referred to, as well. Thinking about what you want to say and boiling it down to the essentials takes time. The upside is that, with a little practice, it helps one to focus and what is essential and strip it as bare as possible. (As you can see, I have since forgotten that valuable lesson and reverted to my old rambling ways.)
- eitally 10y agoYour rambling was the result of providing context. You can be concise and clear when the reader is already knowledgeable. When that's missing, things get messy (witness any corporate email chain involving more than 3 people or 2 teams). Lots of folks have resorted to footnotes, which isn't a bad tool at all, but it detracts from the core message Pascal was trying to relay: know your audience, and make sure each word is carefully selected to reinforce your message.
- adrianratnapala 10y agoEyeballing it, I think I could halve the length of his comment while sharpening the context-giving story. But krylon was probably right not to bother with that second, non-trivial pass.
- ams6110 10y agoCorporate email chains are wordy because everyone wants to mark his territory, or reinforce his relevance.
- ghaff 10y agoI've long been a fan of footnotes. Alas, they often don't work well in electronic formats. But they are a good way to provide context, justification, or additional detail without breaking the flow.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI believe they do work[0], it's that most people simply don't use them. I use them in articles, e-mails and HN comments[1] pretty often ;). -- [0] - especially if you can hyperlink to them and from them back to the main text. [1] - as demonstrated.
- Avshalom 10y agoThe main problem with foot notes in electronic form vs print is the lack of pages. In print you can glance slightly down for the foot note and the back up with out too much effort. In electronic form "without pages" it can be a significant effort to find your place again. < a >'s being remarkably unreliable. Grantland often used marginalia which usually worked well but tragically is non trivial.
- ghaff 10y agoFully agree. By way of comparison, endnotes in printed material are pretty much required citations, etc. But footnotes could often be "Hey, if you want a bit of additional context without interrupting the flow" with a quick glance. But there tends to be a commitment in electronic form to following a hyperlink even if everything works as it's supposed to. I don't have a good solution. It's one of the reasons that fiction works better than non-fiction in non-paginated electronic formats.
- ComputerGuru 10y agoFully agreed, though Wikipedia and Kindle solve this with hover/click to view footnote in a tooltip/bubble - though obviously not as effortless as letting your eyes slide to the bottom of the page, it's honestly not bad.
- KON_Air 10y agoWhile I fully agree mastery of the subject is vital to be able to get your point across with less sentences and/or words, it really needs some time to go over the text to make it worth the label "concise", which just doesn't exist in an exam.
- adrianratnapala 10y agoMaybe you forgot nothing: it's just that HN comments aren't important enough to condense.
- Lordarminius 10y ago> As you can see, I have since forgotten that valuable lesson and reverted to my old rambling ways. A superior way to close your argument. Have an upvote :)
- Spooky23 10y agoI got a crash course in this when I took a journalism class and a history class from a grumpy professor who required handwritten papers and would tear up anything that required two sheets. Probably the single most important thing I did in college.
- daze42 10y agoThis comment intentionally left short.
- CalChris 10y agoTL;DR
- lb1lf 10y agoAs with a lot of witticisms, I guess just about every country attribute it to some native; in Norway, 'everybody' knows nobel laureate, author and bon vivant Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson wrote this. (That would have been sometime between, say, 1875 and 1910, though, so he quite possibly lifted it off one of the people mentioned in the article.)
- dang 10y agoThe attribution to Pascal is as definitive as these things ever get. Quote Investigator just likes to present the case cautiously.
- Artoemius 10y agoAn elucidating quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove."
- lostlogin 10y agoThis sort of attitude leaves us without headphone jacks on our phones.
- JetSpiegel 10y agoNothing more to add while retaining functionality. Otherwise remove everything.
- khedoros1 10y agoOnly if you get to the "nothing left to remove point", and then remove something else. It's best for something to be minimal, as long as it's not also insufficient.
- ctdonath 10y agoWireless headphones are a thing for half of users now. The example you're looking for, and everyone has properly forgotten about, is the short-lived "no UI" iPod Shuffle.
- combatentropy 10y agoWhich is why Albert Einstein said it better: "Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler."
- Zikes 10y agoFeature Golf
- dingaling 10y agoThough what he actually said was: It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. which isn't quite as catchy.
- curtis 10y agoI really liked this quote by Woodrow Wilson: “That depends on the length of the speech,” answered the President. “If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it; if it is a half-hour speech it takes me a week; if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now.”
- maxxxxx 10y agoThat's one thing I have learned at Toastmasters. You typically have 5-7 minutes but the first draft of most speeches is 15 or more. It's hard to let go of things you want to say but the results is always much better.
- ghaff 10y agoThere are exceptions, such as when the intent is to really dive deep on some topic (workshops and the like), but I generally find that keeping talks at conferences to 30 minutes or so, rather than the more typical 50 minutes plus Q&A, results in a better program. It forces people to focus on the key points they want to make and dispense with a lot of stage-setting or unnecessary detail. Unfortunately, hour sessions are sort of the industry standard and a lot of people feel that it's not worth it to give a talk if they're not going to have 60 minutes.
- eevilspock 10y agoIronically all of the source quotes cited in the article are much longer than "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter". I guess it took a century or two to whittle it down further.
- sergio 10y agoThat's not ironic, it's congruent: every quoted person didn't have much time at the moment to make that sentence shorter either.
- ticklemyelmo 10y agoPerfectly applicable to software development. You can bang out a simple unoptimized program in tens or hundreds of lines of some scripting language (that compiles to megabytes of executable) in minutes. Doing the same thing in a highly optimized way with a minimal set of assembly instructions could take weeks or months.
- tromp 10y agoAnd even more applicable to code golfing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf
- koenigdavidmj 10y agoI thought it was Knuth who wrote something to this effect. Not so, but I stumbled onto another gem of his: > Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
- imh 10y agoI often find myself writing something long, so I have to close it with a kind of wrap-up, "this is the point" statement. Then I immediately delete everything except for the wrap-up statement.
- syrrim 10y agoIt isnt until you've fully understand your own point that you can easily explain it to someone else.
- munificent 10y agoThe first draft is for me to figure out what I want to say. The second draft is for me to say it. The third draft is to fix all the mistakes I made in the second draft. The fourth draft is to fix all the mistakes I missed in the third. Around here, it's finally good enough.
- sea6ear 10y agoI've always liked the scene in the movie version of "A River Runs Through it" where the father is teaching his son to write, and has him write an essay, then says "half as long", several times. That has actually been one of the best reminders for me regarding my efforts at writing. Write and compress until the essential points remain.