One of the best English classes I took was technical writing: first assignment was to write a 5 page paper; second assignment was to turn that paper into 2 pages; then 1 page; then a single paragraph. We cut out ALL the fluff.
“and that’s how you write a work email.”
Fucking fantastic.
When I wrote essays in school I pretty much did the opposite process to get to the length I needed. I think I’m generally just a very terse person. That is all.
Most classes require you to do the opposite to hit some arbitrary word or page count. I only ever had one prof who called that out as stupid. “Your coworkers will HATE you if you take the habits learned in most English courses into the workplace. Less is more.”
It’s really hard to unlearn after spending years being as verbose as possible to inflate an essay.
One trick is to tell 'em stories that don’t go anywhere, like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. “Give me five bees for a quarter,” you’d say. Now, where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…
Grandpa, is this you?
My friend says “long story short” then spends 25 minutes telling me about every detail of his doctor’s appointment anyway.
I usually go with “long story shorter…” because I know no matter how much I try to condense things, my explanation will be long simply due to my need to over-explain.
I do this on purpose
I don’t explain what the right answer is
I explain to context of what was considered before coming to the answer.
So I tied and onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.
I think I might work with you.
What if I already do that? #AuDHD
I do it AFTER the rambling story.
“…… short story long, (insert tl;dr verbally)”
It’s like “and then I found 5 dollars”
Because there is a minimum paper length?
Found my colleague
Thank you for your service Mr. Data.
This is a bad habit of mine lol
I made a video a while back on the topic of political violence which I intended to be only like 5min long, but actually turned into 30 minutes as I researched more and came across more stuff I wanted to discuss on this subject.
I’m doing the same thing now as I’m writing an article on the Cass Review which is already 20 pages long and I’m probably gonna go over 30. I have two pages dedicated entirely to discussing only one of the items of the modified Newcastle-Ottawa Scale that some of the systematic reviews used, and I decided to leave it there because if I were to discuss all of the items in detail I could write three times more.
Leave my mum out of this.
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