I am not sure exactly why, but once in a while I read things that are some how or another related to journalism and feel moved or sometimes offended.
I was reading one of Anil Dash's
latest entries about TL;DR .
It is an interesting concept. TL; DR = "Too long; Didn't Read". It means that whatever it is you wrote is too long, so I didn't bother to read it.
I would say that on occasion I have written things that are definitely long (winded).
However, I would like to think that I learned and follow at least on principle of writing news articles. "Put the important points/facts in the front of the article."
This is done for the basic idea that people are impatient and won't read the whole thing.
One could also look at it more like a book jacket. The book jacket (or back of the book) usually has a brief description about the book. The description is supposed to allow you to determine whether or not you would like to read the book.
The first few paragraphs of any news article should be the same. It should provide an overall view of the article, thus providing you enough information to determine whether or not you want to keep reading.
Anil comments on an article by the New York Times and how they buried some very powerful quotes. I would have to agree with Anil's comments about the New York Times, they were always a bit overly long winded and stuffy for me.
However, as a good chunk of my job is writing out specifications for new features and end-user documentation. I think I may have lost sight a little bit about the importance of providing a quick and decisive description.
In reading some Product Management books I came across a similar concept. It went something like this "If you cannot describe on a single piece of paper the concept of what the product/feature is supposed to do/be, then it is too complicated."
While I fully support this, if in the opening page of a technical document I am not able to figure out what the rest of the document is about, I don't want to keep reading.
However, this should not be taken as a knee-jerk reaction to suddenly say "All technical documents must only be 1 page.", as you would never be able to fit all the nitty-gritty details into one-page, regardless of how simple the request.
But the concept should be able to be conveyed in one-page, just the same as when reading the first few paragraphs of a news article you should be able to determine whether or not you rightly can say "TL;DR" or whether you are just being impatient about it.
Laterz
