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.
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.