
If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012) - curtis
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
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curtis
I really liked this quote by Woodrow Wilson:

 _“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.”_

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krylon
This makes me think of a teacher I had in school - he told us we should try to
keep our exams to about 600 words. Whereas students in other classes routinely
wrote about 2000 words, sometimes 3000.

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.)

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eitally
Your rambling was the result of providing context. You can be concise and
clear when the reader is already knowledgeable. When that's missing, things
get messy (witness any corporate email chain involving more than 3 people or 2
teams).

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.

~~~
ghaff
I've long been a fan of footnotes. Alas, they often don't work well in
electronic formats. But they are a good way to provide context, justification,
or additional detail without breaking the flow.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I believe they do work[0], it's that most people simply don't use them. I use
them in articles, e-mails and HN comments[1] pretty often ;).

\--

[0] - especially if you can hyperlink to them and from them back to the main
text.

[1] - as demonstrated.

~~~
Avshalom
The main problem with foot notes in electronic form vs print is the lack of
pages.

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.

~~~
ghaff
Fully agree. By way of comparison, endnotes in printed material are pretty
much required citations, etc. But footnotes could often be "Hey, if you want a
bit of additional context without interrupting the flow" with a quick glance.
But there tends to be a commitment in electronic form to following a hyperlink
even if everything works as it's supposed to. I don't have a good solution.

It's one of the reasons that fiction works better than non-fiction in non-
paginated electronic formats.

------
Artoemius
An elucidating quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

"It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add,
but when there is nothing more to remove."

~~~
lostlogin
This sort of attitude leaves us without headphone jacks on our phones.

~~~
combatentropy
Which is why Albert Einstein said it better: "Everything should be as simple
as possible, but not simpler."

~~~
dingaling
Though what he actually said was:

 _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.

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imh
I often find myself writing something long, so I have to close it with a kind
of wrap-up, "this is the point" statement. Then I immediately delete
everything except for the wrap-up statement.

~~~
munificent
The first draft is for me to figure out what I want to say.

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.

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ticklemyelmo
Perfectly applicable to software development. You can bang out a simple
unoptimized program in tens or hundreds of lines of some scripting language
(that compiles to megabytes of executable) in minutes. Doing the same thing in
a highly optimized way with a minimal set of assembly instructions could take
weeks or months.

~~~
tromp
And even more applicable to code golfing...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf)

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eevilspock
Ironically all of the source quotes cited in the article are much longer than
"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter".

I guess it took a century or two to whittle it down further.

~~~
sergio
That's not ironic, it's congruent: every quoted person didn't have much time
at the moment to make that sentence shorter either.

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lb1lf
As with a lot of witticisms, I guess just about every country attribute it to
some native; in Norway, 'everybody' knows nobel laureate, author and bon
vivant Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson wrote this.

(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.)

~~~
dang
The attribution to Pascal is as definitive as these things ever get. Quote
Investigator just likes to present the case cautiously.

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koenigdavidmj
I thought it was Knuth who wrote something to this effect. Not so, but I
stumbled onto another gem of his:

> _Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried
> it._

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maxxxxx
That's one thing I have learned at Toastmasters. You typically have 5-7
minutes but the first draft of most speeches is 15 or more. It's hard to let
go of things you want to say but the results is always much better.

~~~
ghaff
There are exceptions, such as when the intent is to really dive deep on some
topic (workshops and the like), but I generally find that keeping talks at
conferences to 30 minutes or so, rather than the more typical 50 minutes plus
Q&A, results in a better program. It forces people to focus on the key points
they want to make and dispense with a lot of stage-setting or unnecessary
detail.

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.

~~~
r00fus
Would not better presentations have taken 2 to 3 hours of content and
condensed down to an hour?

~~~
maxxxxx
Not many people have 2 or 3 hours of real content. Filling just an hour is
pretty hard.

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sea6ear
I've always liked the scene in the movie version of "A River Runs Through it"
where the father is teaching his son to write, and has him write an essay,
then says "half as long", several times.

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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daze42
This comment intentionally left short.

~~~
syphilis2
The shortest comment is no comment at all. :)

