Tuesday, July 24, 2012

In Regards to Writing, Fewer Words are Usually More Elegant and Accessible

But the writer needs to draw the line clearly between what they can safely assume the reader already knows and what ideas they still need supplied to them to fully comprehend the point being given. I often encounter writing that fails to draw this line in the proper location, either providing too much information or leaving out some vital concept. I am certain that this blog post itself fails to draw the line properly as well, as any hastily and not-so-hastily scrambled together prose of mine does.

Unfortunately, the problem of drawing the line has no perfect solution, since the audience consists of differing individuals who will require different lines (based either upon their actual knowledge or their initial attention to the piece). Is it then reasonable to find out the average amount of information known and unknown to the general audience, and then base the positioning of the line upon that?

Probably.

I imagine this concept applies pretty well to video game tutorials, if I need to bring this thought back around to the subject matter of this blog.

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