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I consistently write long essays and I lack the patience to edit them to manageable length. More importantly, I lack the moral fibre to discard perfectly good p
by raganwald 15y ago
I consistently write long essays and I lack the patience to edit them to manageable length. More importantly, I lack the moral fibre to discard perfectly good points. Any fool can chop filler out of an essay. It takes an author of sterling character to discard perfectly good ideas in the interest of making what remains an even better essay.
And I lack that character. Having written words about an idea I like, I find it very difficult to let go of them, and my writing suffers for it.
http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-i-downvote-tldr-comments-on-hacker-news http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-i-downvote-tldr-comments-...
- neilk 15y agoAh, I was not saying TL;DR. I don't mind long. I don't even mind Steve Yegge long. What bugged me about this article was the deliberate misdirection, which seemed to me not to have any function in the article. For me it felt like it was just to arrive at a simple point in a more complex way (and thus pad the length out). But there's a huge scope for misunderstanding in these things, so I apologize for assuming too mcuh here. Maybe you thought it would be amusing to come at it from a different angle. Maybe I read it too quickly to appreciate that.