Brevity is the soul of having thought about it some more

[cjsmith]

Yesterday's long-winded Plucky Girl In The Face Of Adversity post could really have been summed up in a heck of a lot fewer words.

Background:

1) My feet are @#$!d up
2) #1 will never go away
3) I seriously hate both #1 and #2

The Main Point:

4) #3 will never go away
5) #4 is kind of sane, really.

There. Simple!

Comments

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

LOL. Yes. Exactly. So, when are you taking up writing instruction manuals for a living?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Honestly, that's something I think I'd enjoy doing. (The bit about high-tech ones having to be written while the code is under development, thus making them half wishful thinking and half pure psychic power, would be a bit of a snag.)

This brain intentionally left blank.

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

*chuckle* Yes, that can be a challenge. But seriously, I think you'd be GOOD at it. You reduced a whole page of text to its essence without losing any of the important bits. Clear, concise, elegant. Impressive.

And I think if you did this in the biosciences (or any sciences) it would be a GIFT to academia. They so desperately need people who can get to the goshdarned point!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Amazing how much clarity comes from knowing ahead of time what exactly it is I really want to say. Brainstorm-hemorrhaging onto the paper gets it all out; revision two is the Pocket Reference Guide.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

"And I'm learning Chinese, says C J Smith"? :)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh, now there'd be quite an achievement: writing technical documentation -- GOOD technical documentation -- in a language so different from one's mother tongue!

(So far, in Mandarin Chinese, I can say "I speak, you speak, he speaks, we speak, you-all speak, they speak." And I can turn it into a question or negate it. But only if I'm reading from my notes with the tone marks!)