2024-10-24
(This is entry 21 of #100DaysToOffload)
There are two ways of espousing an idea: brief, and verbose.
Well, it is of course a spectrum. Yet, it seems today all we see is verbosity. Authors write hundreds of pages on topics for a single topic. Even I have my wordvomits, where I have written in a matter of months hundreds of thousands of worthless words.
Poetry is brief. Prose, literature is verbose. Each word of the fourteen lines of Shakespeare's sonnet has been meticulously crafted: to yield an affect, to rhyme, to create metre. It may take a mere minute or two to read, and yet has had hours of effort poured into it.
When religious authorities decided on a text to express the central Christian beliefs, they chose not to write a great treatise on the matter, but deliberated over a short text: the Nicene Creed. Only a few lines, with each word of importance.
Which is better? Shorter texts, like poetry spawn many interpretations. All may agree on a central theme, but the specifics can be very heavily debated...
On the other hand, expressing things in too much verbosity causes an excess of precision, and has a tendency towards fragility, over-specification. Both imprecision and overexactitude are problematic in their own way.
How about the shortest possible verbose text?