5 ms·

Part of the problem is articles like this. There were perhaps five interesting sentences of content in that entire piece, and several hundred entirely redundant

Part of the problem is articles like this. There were perhaps five interesting sentences of content in that entire piece, and several hundred entirely redundant words and personal examples used only to set the tone. If modern writers have such disrespect for their audience, is it any wonder some of that audience hasn't the attention span to stick with it? Older, serious, and timeless literature requires deep concentration because the authors use their thousands of words to express deep pathos that can't be trivialised. It takes practice to commit oneself to a book like that for long enough to get into a flow wherein it can be understood and appreciated. It's _easier_ to read fluff because the dopamine hits quicker, but (for some people) it's worth the effort to read something more meaningful. In some ways there's an analogy to coding; some books I can't read unless I've got the time to be isolated from distractions. Similarly, some coding problems I can't make progress unless I know I've got more than a half hour to pre-load my brain cache. Given that I'm railing about redundant words, this seems an appropriate point to stop.

jwr 12y ago
This is the problem I have with the recent surge of popularity of "long-form" articles. Most are long on form, but short on content. People get excited about this form of writing (often pulling in whole ideology of distraction-free reading), but I find it hard to get excited when the actual meaning is scarce. I don't have that problem with good books, so don't put me in the "modern civilization problems" drawer.
- weland 12y ago
  Many years ago (10+), back when printed media was still relevant in IT, I used to work for a local computer magazine whose senior editor was this witty, funny guy with a sharp mind - an unlikely case of a bohemian, post-modernist poet actually managing to do serious journalism. On tech topics no less. With this being printed media, "long-form" was more or less the norm for the more in-depth article, and space requirements were very strenuous: you had exactly this much space to fill, no more, no less [1]. But we were explicitly encouraged to choose topics for which "this much space" was meaningful (for those of my colleagues who didn't get to choose their topics, like the hardware folks who had to write about whatever was happening, the choice of topic and assigned space went hand in hand). Sometimes, I'd choose to cover two or three things in the space that was given to me in order to avoid writing pretentious equivalents to Lorem ipsum so as to fill in the page. I fondly remember the stern, to-the-point feedback that we'd get from our senior editor. A draft of this article would have probably received a feedback like "twice longer than it needs to be. Make it shorter, send me pics." The gist was that there was no such thing as "long-" or "shortform". What you wanted was exactly-as-long-as-it-needs-to-be-form. Some points require many words to convey. Some don't. It's being selective in your verbalization that draws the line between eloquence and hypergraphia. The entire "I am an optimist" section is an unfortunate example of that. 1. Most of us weren't exactly experienced journalists though, so filling "this much space" was often achieved with a lot of help from the heroic DTP team, which basically survived on coffee during the last week of an edition.
klipt 12y ago
> If modern writers have such disrespect for their audience As opposed to whom, paid-by-the-word Dickens and his amazing menagerie of circumlocutions? ;-)
- Schwolop 12y ago
  Touché!
- panglott 12y ago
  Perhaps, but the further back you go, the starker the shift in reading habits becomes. I skimmed this article in 5 minutes and probably won't remember it tomorrow. Compare two centuries ago, when the only books most people had were the Bible and Milton, and they memorized every word. Or three centuries before that, when the people who could read might have to travel across Europe to read a particular book, and might commit each page to a memory palace.
nicohvi 12y ago
I completely agree with your point. It seems to me that a vast number of authors/writers (especially apparent in journalists here in Norway) fetishize their own voice, and become so enamored with it that they neglect their actual subject matter. I don't want to read your irrelevant anectode or clever ironic remark, I want to learn about the subject you promised me.
Nursie 12y ago
>>Older, serious, and timeless literature requires deep concentration because the authors use their thousands of words to express deep pathos that can't be trivialised. It takes practice to commit oneself to a book like that for long enough to get into a flow wherein it can be understood and appreciated. Literature that must be studied to be understood, that must be decoded, that the author spent years on, cramming endless meaning into every last sentence... This is not fun to read and never has been, even before the age of digital distraction. I don't aspire to read 'great works' that can only be decrypted if you have a degree in literature, in fact I don't think that sort of literature is objectively any good at all - it self-limits, it speaks only to the cognoscenti, and misses out on speaking to everyone else.
- andrepd 12y ago
  I disagree. If there is one thing that is effectively endless is books to read. If you read one book per week for you entire life you would barely scratch the surface. This means that there is an incredible variety of books ranging from the fun entertaining page-turners those books that you "need a degree" to understand. The thing is, just because a book has a higher entry barrier (and a higher payoff) doesn't mean that it is objectively bad because it doesn't appeal to everyone. Maybe it's not for you, but it can certainly be appealing to many people who enjoy delving into a book and analysing if and so on. I don't have an English degree so I probably won't be arsed to put it the effort to read Finnegans Wake or whatever. But I certainly enjoy reading and analysing boss with more depth than DaVinci's Code. The same thing happens with games. Maybe you have no interest learning chess, and prefer to play Angry Birds because it gives instant payoff with little effort. And that's fine. But it doesn't mean that chess is "objectively inferior" because there is depth to it enough to study full-time for a lifetime. Same thing happens with music, and any art form, I guess.
  - Nursie 12y ago
    We shall have to agree to disagree then. Literary analysis doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. The enjoyable part of the reading experience for me is engaging with the picture it paints, with the world it posits and the characters it places within it. I certainly enjoy reading books with more depth that The DaVinci Code, but I can think of little that would interrupt my enjoyment of reading more than stepping back and analysing 'clever' sentence structures. I occasionally enjoy strategic board-games, in order to understand the emergent rules of play that come from the board and given rules. That said I have never really bothered with chess. I don't think chess is objectively inferior to other games though, I don't think the two are equivalent. Literature with deliberate, designed density of meaning comes across as intentional obfuscation rather than simple complexity.
Singletoned 12y ago
My father once described Malcolm Gladwell as "that man who writes books that should be essays". I think that also sums up my feelings about this. A particular bugbear of mine is when a non-fiction article starts by describing the weather or somesuch. If the opening line is "It was a warm summer's day when Joshua first..." then I just give up then and there. There's no glory in padding.
- undersuit 11y ago
  Was it padding? In ASOIAF the description of the scene is one of the only hints George R.R. Martin gives us of when a chapter happens. The moon and a comet provide a number of time references in the books.
thewhitetulip 12y ago
I am not a huge fan of Medium.com, it has way too less content displayed per screen, way too huge font and one has to scroll all the way down to read anything, it is annoying , not to mention the huge images everwhere, which gives the images more importance than the content.
- hellameta 12y ago
  Agreed. Are there any websites that you really like the presentation?
  - thewhitetulip 12y ago
    I had read Sam Altman's blog on postheaven, I really liked that blogging platform, it is clean with more focus on the text content rather than the pictures.
hughmcguire 12y ago
out of curiosity (seriously) which were the 5?
- Schwolop 12y ago
  Ha! To be honest, I now can't even remember - and it's only a day later, so perhaps the true answer is zero. There was some stuff about speed of dopamine response that was interesting. It aligned with some stuff about dopamine addiction by a guy called Charles Faraone who I'd been reading on Quora. I did find his proposed solution interesting, but I'd have preferred it stated up front and then explained, rather than left until the final paragraphs by which point I'd lost attentiveness anyway.
rturben 12y ago
In an age where communication platforms are so readily abundant and (relatively) easily accessible, people aren't forced to write economically. Contrast this with even fifty years ago when in order to get more than a handful of people to read your work, it had to be published in some way.

jwr 12y ago

This is the problem I have with the recent surge of popularity of "long-form" articles. Most are long on form, but short on content. People get excited about this form of writing (often pulling in whole ideology of distraction-free reading), but I find it hard to get excited when the actual meaning is scarce. I don't have that problem with good books, so don't put me in the "modern civilization problems" drawer.

weland 12y ago
Many years ago (10+), back when printed media was still relevant in IT, I used to work for a local computer magazine whose senior editor was this witty, funny guy with a sharp mind - an unlikely case of a bohemian, post-modernist poet actually managing to do serious journalism. On tech topics no less. With this being printed media, "long-form" was more or less the norm for the more in-depth article, and space requirements were very strenuous: you had exactly this much space to fill, no more, no less [1]. But we were explicitly encouraged to choose topics for which "this much space" was meaningful (for those of my colleagues who didn't get to choose their topics, like the hardware folks who had to write about whatever was happening, the choice of topic and assigned space went hand in hand). Sometimes, I'd choose to cover two or three things in the space that was given to me in order to avoid writing pretentious equivalents to Lorem ipsum so as to fill in the page. I fondly remember the stern, to-the-point feedback that we'd get from our senior editor. A draft of this article would have probably received a feedback like "twice longer than it needs to be. Make it shorter, send me pics." The gist was that there was no such thing as "long-" or "shortform". What you wanted was exactly-as-long-as-it-needs-to-be-form. Some points require many words to convey. Some don't. It's being selective in your verbalization that draws the line between eloquence and hypergraphia. The entire "I am an optimist" section is an unfortunate example of that. 1. Most of us weren't exactly experienced journalists though, so filling "this much space" was often achieved with a lot of help from the heroic DTP team, which basically survived on coffee during the last week of an edition.

klipt 12y ago

> If modern writers have such disrespect for their audience As opposed to whom, paid-by-the-word Dickens and his amazing menagerie of circumlocutions? ;-)

Schwolop 12y ago
Touché!
panglott 12y ago
Perhaps, but the further back you go, the starker the shift in reading habits becomes. I skimmed this article in 5 minutes and probably won't remember it tomorrow. Compare two centuries ago, when the only books most people had were the Bible and Milton, and they memorized every word. Or three centuries before that, when the people who could read might have to travel across Europe to read a particular book, and might commit each page to a memory palace.

nicohvi 12y ago

I completely agree with your point. It seems to me that a vast number of authors/writers (especially apparent in journalists here in Norway) fetishize their own voice, and become so enamored with it that they neglect their actual subject matter. I don't want to read your irrelevant anectode or clever ironic remark, I want to learn about the subject you promised me.

Nursie 12y ago

>>Older, serious, and timeless literature requires deep concentration because the authors use their thousands of words to express deep pathos that can't be trivialised. It takes practice to commit oneself to a book like that for long enough to get into a flow wherein it can be understood and appreciated. Literature that must be studied to be understood, that must be decoded, that the author spent years on, cramming endless meaning into every last sentence... This is not fun to read and never has been, even before the age of digital distraction. I don't aspire to read 'great works' that can only be decrypted if you have a degree in literature, in fact I don't think that sort of literature is objectively any good at all - it self-limits, it speaks only to the cognoscenti, and misses out on speaking to everyone else.

andrepd 12y ago
I disagree. If there is one thing that is effectively endless is books to read. If you read one book per week for you entire life you would barely scratch the surface. This means that there is an incredible variety of books ranging from the fun entertaining page-turners those books that you "need a degree" to understand. The thing is, just because a book has a higher entry barrier (and a higher payoff) doesn't mean that it is objectively bad because it doesn't appeal to everyone. Maybe it's not for you, but it can certainly be appealing to many people who enjoy delving into a book and analysing if and so on. I don't have an English degree so I probably won't be arsed to put it the effort to read Finnegans Wake or whatever. But I certainly enjoy reading and analysing boss with more depth than DaVinci's Code. The same thing happens with games. Maybe you have no interest learning chess, and prefer to play Angry Birds because it gives instant payoff with little effort. And that's fine. But it doesn't mean that chess is "objectively inferior" because there is depth to it enough to study full-time for a lifetime. Same thing happens with music, and any art form, I guess.
- Nursie 12y ago
  We shall have to agree to disagree then. Literary analysis doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. The enjoyable part of the reading experience for me is engaging with the picture it paints, with the world it posits and the characters it places within it. I certainly enjoy reading books with more depth that The DaVinci Code, but I can think of little that would interrupt my enjoyment of reading more than stepping back and analysing 'clever' sentence structures. I occasionally enjoy strategic board-games, in order to understand the emergent rules of play that come from the board and given rules. That said I have never really bothered with chess. I don't think chess is objectively inferior to other games though, I don't think the two are equivalent. Literature with deliberate, designed density of meaning comes across as intentional obfuscation rather than simple complexity.

Singletoned 12y ago

My father once described Malcolm Gladwell as "that man who writes books that should be essays". I think that also sums up my feelings about this. A particular bugbear of mine is when a non-fiction article starts by describing the weather or somesuch. If the opening line is "It was a warm summer's day when Joshua first..." then I just give up then and there. There's no glory in padding.

undersuit 11y ago
Was it padding? In ASOIAF the description of the scene is one of the only hints George R.R. Martin gives us of when a chapter happens. The moon and a comet provide a number of time references in the books.

thewhitetulip 12y ago

I am not a huge fan of Medium.com, it has way too less content displayed per screen, way too huge font and one has to scroll all the way down to read anything, it is annoying , not to mention the huge images everwhere, which gives the images more importance than the content.

hellameta 12y ago
Agreed. Are there any websites that you really like the presentation?
- thewhitetulip 12y ago
  I had read Sam Altman's blog on postheaven, I really liked that blogging platform, it is clean with more focus on the text content rather than the pictures.

hughmcguire 12y ago

out of curiosity (seriously) which were the 5?

Schwolop 12y ago
Ha! To be honest, I now can't even remember - and it's only a day later, so perhaps the true answer is zero. There was some stuff about speed of dopamine response that was interesting. It aligned with some stuff about dopamine addiction by a guy called Charles Faraone who I'd been reading on Quora. I did find his proposed solution interesting, but I'd have preferred it stated up front and then explained, rather than left until the final paragraphs by which point I'd lost attentiveness anyway.

rturben 12y ago

In an age where communication platforms are so readily abundant and (relatively) easily accessible, people aren't forced to write economically. Contrast this with even fifty years ago when in order to get more than a handful of people to read your work, it had to be published in some way.