Oddbean new post about login | logout If you’re writing a book to articulate a thought, you’re either chat gpting or don’t know what you’re talking about.
On Writing Well caused me to rebel against minimum word counts in college. Shorter is better when it comes to writing. 🫡
Thanks for the tldr
The comment with more words did a better job explaining the importance of brevity.
More words than a book?
Word count isn't the only indicator of good writing. Using more words than necessary is bad writing. A book can contain more than a single thought, and some people have reason to dig beneath the headline for some topics. Rehashing what has already been written elsewhere is a waste of time, hence the book recommendation. I've read many great books that were absolutely worth being written and read. I use such knowledge to prevent people from dying at work, for example. It turns out that some topics need to be deeply understood and require more space than a tweet to teach. However, that doesn't mean a book should be 200 pages if 100 pages would do.
That's a great book.
Simple is best, yes, but IMO it first takes long writing to capture the key nuances and context. Then you can boil it down to the key points.
Most of the time, yes. The exception is for concepts that strain the limits of language.
If the prevailing lexicon doesn't support the vocabulary of your idea...good fucking luck communicating it effectively in one shot! You'll need to build analogies. Coherent & complete ones. Lots of them. It's frankly wasteful not to compile them together.
OR you’re a novelist. Novel idea :)
Fully agree, writing books is strictly for people with more than one thought