3 ms·

Hereby I declare, with great emphasis on the words I am writing at this precise moment, that the idea expressed in your previous comment regarding the possibili

by kaoD 8y ago

Hereby I declare, with great emphasis on the words I am writing at this precise moment, that the idea expressed in your previous comment regarding the possibility of condensing written expression to be more succinct while, at the same time, preserving the meaning inherently given to it in its original incarnation... oh, I reached the quota. Done! :) TL;DR: I strongly disagree with your first phrase. This is what GP was hinting at. This technique (well, a subtler approach) is very common among students to reach quotas. Communication is unfortunately composed of both meaning and fluff (sometimes even only fluff, disguised as meaning under the name of "long-form writing"). Removing the fluff while preserving meaning is a skill, not something to avoid to reach an artificial metric. Quotas are just a lazy assessing technique.

jacobolus 8y ago
And your first paragraph shares a lot of additional information: the writer has nothing in particular to say, and is just pretentiously filling the air as a stalling tactic. You could condense that down to something like ... > [... incompetent bloviating elided ...] ... without losing any “meaning” (denotation), because there was none to begin with. Knowing what a windbag sounds like and knowing how to replicate that impression is a fine writing skill. A fiction author might want to portray a windbag character. A public relations or marketing team might want to whitewash a corrupt company or puff up a useless product. A debater without an argument might want to dump an avalanche of nonsense to distract the audience. If students write shitty papers which they pad out with pages of fluff not making an argument, the problem is (often) that the students didn’t want to put in the work, not that they didn’t understand the difference. The teacher should feel free to mercilessly put Xs through whole paragraphs, with marginal comments like “this says nothing”.

by kaoD 8y ago

jacobolus 8y ago

And your first paragraph shares a lot of additional information: the writer has nothing in particular to say, and is just pretentiously filling the air as a stalling tactic. You could condense that down to something like ... > [... incompetent bloviating elided ...] ... without losing any “meaning” (denotation), because there was none to begin with. Knowing what a windbag sounds like and knowing how to replicate that impression is a fine writing skill. A fiction author might want to portray a windbag character. A public relations or marketing team might want to whitewash a corrupt company or puff up a useless product. A debater without an argument might want to dump an avalanche of nonsense to distract the audience. If students write shitty papers which they pad out with pages of fluff not making an argument, the problem is (often) that the students didn’t want to put in the work, not that they didn’t understand the difference. The teacher should feel free to mercilessly put Xs through whole paragraphs, with marginal comments like “this says nothing”.