If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)
quoteinvestigator.com
quoteinvestigator.com
“That depends on the length of the speech,” answered the President. “If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it; if it is a half-hour speech it takes me a week; if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now.”
I first disliked him, because he meant business - my first exam with this teacher was about 1100 words, and he explicitly told me he would have given me a better grade if it had been shorter. (Boy, was I mad!)
But in time, I came to appreciate this attitude, because it forced me to really think about what I wanted to say and how to say it. And I suppose that is what Pascal referred to, as well. Thinking about what you want to say and boiling it down to the essentials takes time.
The upside is that, with a little practice, it helps one to focus and what is essential and strip it as bare as possible.
(As you can see, I have since forgotten that valuable lesson and reverted to my old rambling ways.)
Lots of folks have resorted to footnotes, which isn't a bad tool at all, but it detracts from the core message Pascal was trying to relay: know your audience, and make sure each word is carefully selected to reinforce your message.
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[0] - especially if you can hyperlink to them and from them back to the main text.
[1] - as demonstrated.
In print you can glance slightly down for the foot note and the back up with out too much effort. In electronic form "without pages" it can be a significant effort to find your place again. < a >'s being remarkably unreliable.
Grantland often used marginalia which usually worked well but tragically is non trivial.
It's one of the reasons that fiction works better than non-fiction in non-paginated electronic formats.
A superior way to close your argument. Have an upvote :)
Probably the single most important thing I did in college.
"It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove."
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
which isn't quite as catchy.
The example you're looking for, and everyone has properly forgotten about, is the short-lived "no UI" iPod Shuffle.
The second draft is for me to say it.
The third draft is to fix all the mistakes I made in the second draft.
The fourth draft is to fix all the mistakes I missed in the third. Around here, it's finally good enough.
I guess it took a century or two to whittle it down further.
(That would have been sometime between, say, 1875 and 1910, though, so he quite possibly lifted it off one of the people mentioned in the article.)
> Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Unfortunately, hour sessions are sort of the industry standard and a lot of people feel that it's not worth it to give a talk if they're not going to have 60 minutes.
That has actually been one of the best reminders for me regarding my efforts at writing. Write and compress until the essential points remain.
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