Subscribe to Posts
Subscribe to CommentsIndividual Entry: Finding brevity
« One Hundredth |
Main
| Linguistics »
If you read this blog, PLEASE sign in to my guest book on frappr.
No personally identifying information is needed, so this is risk-free. Just provide a name (even a nickname), your zip code, and any statement you want to make ("hi" is sufficient).If you want to know more about me, click here.
August 01, 2005
Life : Finding brevity
I typically compose my blog entries in Microsoft Word (tm) before posting them, and my rule of thumb is that I try to keep them to under a page given my default Word settings. If the last paragraph crosses into a second page, that's OK; but I try to avoid postings longer than that (I realize for many people even that is too long).
The problem is, there are a number of topics I think about which I have not posted on because every time I start to write a posting I end up with two or three pages in word, and I don't want to start asking for that much of people's time. I've thought about starting a second blog for long essays, for which I would post short introductions here; but if I really believed that was of value I might as well just post them here.
No, what I need to do is find shorter ways of expressing what I want to say.
Looking at why many of these essays end up so long, I realized that while there are topics on which I am comfortable simply stating my opinion and letting stand or fall on its own; there are other subjects where I have felt compelled to provide a justification for my opinion. It is with these topics I have ended up with pages of supporting data to go along with the simple statement of what I am thinking.
As an example, when I have attempted to write about my faith, my tendency is to not just say what I have been thinking about; but also provide either long stories to explain how I came to that conclusion or references to the Bible verses which have led me there. The resulting essays rarely conform to my self-imposed one page limit. This also applies to some political and scientific topics I have pondered in the last 4 months.
I think I am just going to have to focus on stating my observations and trust my audience to ask if they want to know how I got there.
Posted by Steven at August 1, 2005 01:45 PM
Comments
You've had a few entries for which the main page of your blog gave the first block of text and then the rest of the entry was continued on a separate page. I think that works well - if people want to read it, they will, and if they don't, it's not a huge chunk of text to skim through or skip over.
Posted by: Melissa at August 1, 2005 05:43 PM
