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Almost all the books and blog posts can be made at least 10 times shorter without loss in educational value. People just include too much of irrelevant stuff wh
by qwerty456127 8y ago
Almost all the books and blog posts can be made at least 10 times shorter without loss in educational value. People just include too much of irrelevant stuff when writing. Schools should teach brevity and search engines should encourage it instead of requiring people to inflate their writings as much as they can.
For many books you can just find summaries online, read/watch them and hardly loose anything compared to reading the whole book.
- fires10 8y agoI agree. I had to critique fellow classmates writing in a business writing course once. I am older and had been in the business world for a while. My one often used critique was brevity. I didn't have all day for then to get to the point.
- qwerty456127 8y agoYet every school/college assignment includes a minimum length requirement, web copywriters are paid for length and a 1000-page book is easier to market than a concise brochure.
- ivan_ah 8y agoSo true! I think the problem is particularly bad in high-school and first-year undergraduate textbooks, which are "padded" with useless extras, non-sense boxes, and lots of blah blah to the point of being literally 5x thicker than they need to be. Let's face it, nobody is going to read a 1000+ page PHYS 101 textbook. Textbooks for graduate level courses are usually much better, as are textbooks outside the North American educational system, and best of all are old math textbooks from like 100+ years ago...
- qwerty456127 8y agoBTW, whoever wants a really concise "zero-to-hero" level PHYS 101 book read "No bullshit guide to math and physics" by Ivan Savov.
- falcor84 8y agoI would strongly recommend Feynman's lectures as an amazing intro to undergrad physics. http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
- threatofrain 8y agoThat's partly because people write for several audiences simultaneously. Once you say, "Oh, but some of my readers won't know X, I can't assume that..." It's an endless question, so at some point you have to admit that you can't write the most accessible book in the universe. But if you begin to even think "Oh, but some of my readers won't understand X" and you write a little supplemental chapter or section, the book starts to engorge. Then you go to one of those condensed books for math and you think about what kinds of people meaningfully consume these books.