On redundant and concise writting
Albert Einstein stated that everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler. Developing a little this idea, a statement is simple when you have removed from it everything you can and you still express the same idea.
French are specially concerned about the format of their writing. Americans too but not to the same extent. They use formulas to write texts in which each part of the text should contain some predetermined kind of information. For instance in an essay, you must write an introduction telling what you will say, then two paragraphs saying it, and then
a final paragraph indicating what you said. If you think about it, in this example you're sort of saying the same thing three times. This ultraredundant writing style is shocking for a concise writer. Some friends of mine are concise writers and consequently they dislike this approach.
This week I had to express a procedure/idea to some people. I did it in a very concise way. After I finished the presentation people started to ask questions, which is normal. I was shocked to find that some questions were not about implications of what I had just said, but about express things that I had already said. I answered with "as I said before, ... ". What happens to this people?
After reflecting on the issue, I came to reason that being concise may be good, but if you are too concise, your audience requires to focus all their attention during all your presentation. You may think that this is expected if they respect you and what you are saying. However, in this stupid world of us with multiple distractions and attention deficient humans this is not likely. Modeling the communication process a little bit, in a presentation, you have a noisy channel in which the presenter transmits a message and the audience is to receive it. In order to increase the chances the audience receives the correct message, it's necessary to insert redundancy. So, we shouldn't be completely concise.
Redundant writting styles take into consideration the lack of attention of the reader, they are more resilient to partial loss of content and they capture the interest of the potential reader who can quickly select among multiple texts to focus all attention in a particular field. Now our task will be to choose a minimal amount of redundancy that makes our texts resilient and still concise.
French are specially concerned about the format of their writing. Americans too but not to the same extent. They use formulas to write texts in which each part of the text should contain some predetermined kind of information. For instance in an essay, you must write an introduction telling what you will say, then two paragraphs saying it, and then
a final paragraph indicating what you said. If you think about it, in this example you're sort of saying the same thing three times. This ultraredundant writing style is shocking for a concise writer. Some friends of mine are concise writers and consequently they dislike this approach.
This week I had to express a procedure/idea to some people. I did it in a very concise way. After I finished the presentation people started to ask questions, which is normal. I was shocked to find that some questions were not about implications of what I had just said, but about express things that I had already said. I answered with "as I said before, ... ". What happens to this people?
After reflecting on the issue, I came to reason that being concise may be good, but if you are too concise, your audience requires to focus all their attention during all your presentation. You may think that this is expected if they respect you and what you are saying. However, in this stupid world of us with multiple distractions and attention deficient humans this is not likely. Modeling the communication process a little bit, in a presentation, you have a noisy channel in which the presenter transmits a message and the audience is to receive it. In order to increase the chances the audience receives the correct message, it's necessary to insert redundancy. So, we shouldn't be completely concise.
Redundant writting styles take into consideration the lack of attention of the reader, they are more resilient to partial loss of content and they capture the interest of the potential reader who can quickly select among multiple texts to focus all attention in a particular field. Now our task will be to choose a minimal amount of redundancy that makes our texts resilient and still concise.
posted by Gralfca at 10:34 AM
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