>And even in "normal" applications -- where the majority of users are not knowledgable enough to know that their spelling could be to blame -- an error message

>And even in "normal" applications -- where the majority of users are not knowledgable enough to know that their spelling could be to blame -- an error message that's too verbose is still problematic, because many, if not most, non-techy users won't bother reading it! Assuming users are 'too dumb' or 'smart enough' sounds like a broad generalization that's highly dependent on the tool. I'm glad we have verbose compiler errors, and I write C++ for a living. Am I too smart for verbose output? My grandmother can't login in to Facebook, should we forego the error dialogs because she's not going to read them? I believe that terse error messages have their place, but this article over generalizes and is full of personal preference rather than data driven conclusions.