“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.”
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.)
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.
Eyeballing it, I think I could halve the length of his comment while sharpening the context-giving story. But krylon was probably right not to bother with that second, non-trivial pass.
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.
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.
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.
Fully agreed, though Wikipedia and Kindle solve this with hover/click to view footnote in a tooltip/bubble - though obviously not as effortless as letting your eyes slide to the bottom of the page, it's honestly not bad.
While I fully agree mastery of the subject is vital to be able to get your point across with less sentences and/or words, it really needs some time to go over the text to make it worth the label "concise", which just doesn't exist in an exam.
I got a crash course in this when I took a journalism class and a history class from a grumpy professor who required handwritten papers and would tear up anything that required two sheets.
Probably the single most important thing I did in college.
Only if you get to the "nothing left to remove point", and then remove something else. It's best for something to be minimal, as long as it's not also insufficient.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
“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.”