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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

You dislike verbose, repetitive writing because its information content is low. Taut, clear prose has high information content. The taut, clear prose you are talking about is usually higher in total content than masses of verbose, repetitive writing, despite the quantity of words. I mean "information" in the information theoretic sense, especially in the semi-informal "extent to which the words are a surprise" sense (which I find the most useful formulation for measuring English text, though note there's a relative component to that definition).

It is not surprising that more effort is required to create more information. I don't see where we need a new theory here.

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I wasn't clear or you're blurring information content and density and thereby missing my point (!). Consider:

- VERBOSE: “One of the best things you can do for yourself to improve your writing is to learn how to cut out words that are not necessary.”

- TAUT: “To improve your writing, cut out unnecessary words.”

In at least the senses I care about I don't see any information in TAUT absent from VERBOSE; if you see any such information TAUT please do point it out.

Which is what I was getting at: TAUT prose communicates identical thoughts with fewer words; why is it so difficult and unnatural to generate?

I find this curious. I now have some suspicions but nothing extremely well-formed.

(!) You'd be right that in the context of essays-for-school the target wordcount is predetermined and information is expensive so the lazy satisfy the requirement(s) with the verbal equivalent of double-spacing + jumbo font.

In verbose form, it's almost like letting your thoughts spew onto the page directly. With taut writing, a lot of that mental clarification is done in your head before it hits the page.

But why are thoughts jumbled, mostly?

Is there anything to be learned from the structure of the jumbling?

No answers, just getting it out there.

Re-read the original commenter once you realize he was talking about information-per-word, not total information content.

But it's not necessarily true that if "verbose repetitive writing", has less information content than "taut clear prose". They could have the same information content, just the former has used more bits to describe the same information (i.e. is less compressed). I guess his question is why some people naturally produce the former and not the latter. Perhaps they just haven't performed the necessary computation required to compress the information while they were learning it, i.e. compression could either take place while they are storing the information in memory, or else during the editing process.

It depends on the goal of your writing. Concise writing with minimized wording and maximized content is good for informative writing. However writing a book or a paragraph to cause or reflect emotional effect does require additional unnecessary words and possible redundancy

Less verbose and more information rich writing requires a more nuanced and deeper command of the language. Think of it like a compression algorithm. Algorithms that can encapsulate more information in a smaller file size are much more complex than less information-efficient algorithms.

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