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On the contrary, a person skilled at Twitter could have compressed the essence of what you wrote into 280 characters. I’ve found the best books and essays are
by gfodor 5y ago
On the contrary, a person skilled at Twitter could have compressed the essence of what you wrote into 280 characters.
I’ve found the best books and essays are similarly compressible, with the rest of the information being about bolstering it as being worthy of the precious few slots in your L1 cache.
- rfrey 5y agoThe essence, perhaps... with none of the nuance or shading. If one thinks that is unnecessary, dispensable fluff, Twitter is no doubt sufficient for most writing. And a rhyming dictionary contains all poetry in many fewer pages.
- jasonladuke0311 5y ago> The essence, perhaps... with none of the nuance or shading Precisely why the worlds problems are all solvable on Twitter.
- DocTomoe 5y agoYep, I do remember the many problems Twitter solved. Without Twitter, we would be centuries away from enlightened world peace and mutual understanding.
- jolux 5y agoNuance and shading is not entirely unselfish. Too much nuance indicates a lack of trust in your reader.
- otterley 5y agoGiven the nature and quality of replies I’ve seen even on HN — where there are no such character limits and the level of education its members have is higher on average — it seems to me that trust has yet to be earned.
- gfodor 5y agoI explicitly said that it’s necessary, but generally it’s not for the primary purpose of encoding the core point one is trying to make. Nuance to me is more about convincing the unpersuaded reader the idea has merit and is important or useful. Which is why Twitter allows reasonable idea propagation but does a terrible job of persuading people who disagree.
- laszlojamf 5y agoBefore twitter it was called aphorisms and Nietzsche was doing it before it was cool.
- hammock 5y agoDoes the master oil painter not start with charcoal pencil?
- BurningFrog 5y ago"Brevity is the soul of wit", and saying what you have to say with as few and simple words as possible is essential for a good writer. It is, however, far from the only important thing!
- brian_cunnie 5y agoI agree: Twitter forces you to be succinct, a useful skill when writing an Executive Summary for a business paper or an Abstract for a paper in a scientific journal.