User:Coppertwig/Brevity

Purpose of this essay

 * Purpose: To teach people how to write short talk page posts
 * Description: A list of techniques I use for shortening talk page posts
 * Hoped-for response: that readers will practice some of these techniques to develop their skills in shortening things and become more aware of length
 * Summary: Use edit summaries to practice. Write down the purpose of your message. Divide a long post into short paragraphs and repoace each paragraph with a sentence. Delete material not directly related to the purpose.

Why to write short messages
Typically, a Wikipedia talk page post is written by one person and read by many, so it's worthwhile putting time and effort into making it easier for the reader. Time is limited: if posts are half as long, readers can read twice as many of them and potentially participate in twice as many discussions. It also increases the number of people who will probably read your whole message.

You can choose the most important part of your message and present only that, rather than have readers choose at random some part of your long post to read, and maybe missing your main point.

Practice by using edit summaries
Use edit summaries which are more than a few words and which fully describe or summarize your message.

Hypothetical example of edit summaries for a talk page post:
 * Description: Three reasons to keep two separate articles rather than merge; or
 * Summary: 2 articles better: Topics are distinct. Single article too long. No logical way to organize subheadings in longer article.; or
 * Invitation to action: ''Please undo the merge and restore the original two articles."
 * First part of your message: In this case it's really better to retain two separate articles. The two topics are two separate concepts. There isn't even any obvious way to come up with a good name for the merged article that isn' 

Using these types of edit summary will give you practice in summarizing, so that you may develop your skill over time. It will also get your message out to more people, since some people might only look at the edit summaries; or they might become interested and read your whole message when they see your edit summary.

Sometimes I write a long message, think I've condensed it as much as possible, then write an edit summary and realize that I can replace my whole message with just the edit summary.

Write down your purpose
Privately, to help you think about it, when composing a message you can write down a purpose, description, the response you hope to get from others, or a summary. (See the top of this page for examples.)

After writing down the purpose, you can re-read your message to see whether it accomplishes its purpose well. You may decide to discard and rewrite it. You can delete material that isn't necessary to the purpose. You might decide to replace your message with a short statement similar to your statement of purpose.

Blah blah blah gold
In the book "If you can talk, you can write" by Joel Saltzman, it says that if you write down what you say, it will be of the form "blah blah blah gold". The skill in being a good writer is to recognize the gold and prune away everything else. When pruning plants, one removes perfectly healthy leaves, branches and flowers. When pruning text, one removes passages which are useful and valuable and for which one has a great fondness. Nevertheless, out they go: snip! leaving only the gold.

Shortening a long message
To make a long message shorter, you can divide it into short paragraphs of about three sentences each, and try to replace each paragraph with a single sentence or part of a sentence. You might just delete paragraphs which digress from the overall message.