To brag a little, my favorite feedback on the newsletters I send is "Thanks! Short and sweet, loved it!" to a 1000 word email.
It's okay to write long. But it needs to feel short by being concise.
You can always tell when someone squeezes a 1000 page book into 200 pages. It feels short and insightful. But when they expand a 20 page book into 200 pages, it feels like fluff. You can tell when that happens too.
A good pattern to observe is an author's first and second best seller.
The first is often amazing. A decade of lessons and insights squeezed into a book. The fast followup is usually fluff. 2 years of add-ons expanded into a full book.
Obviously there are subjects where it would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to express in a short format, and obviously if it requires it, then take the amount of space that you need. I think the goal should be "aim for brevity, but be clear."
One of my favorite examples of this are Ron Pressler's "TLA+ in Practice and Theory" posts. It's four extremely long blog posts, but it contains what feels like multiple textbooks' worth of information in there. By comparison to how long it could be, I think it's incredible how concise it is.
> You can always tell when someone squeezes a 1000 page book into 200 pages. It feels short and insightful.
I disagree with this argument. You can most certainly tell when someone is trying to squeeze too much into a too small of a space. The sentences are dense and the information density prohibits actually gleaning anything.
You are right there are limits where too much summarizing drops important details. Generally though I prefer writing where the author had to aggressively kill the unimportant because they ran out of space to the writing that fluffs up to fill more space than it needs.
Twitter threads that are an expert deep dive into some historical event/story, a law, a court case, a mathematical theory, etc are some of my favorite kinds of writing to read.
Each tweet in the thread is often accompanied by a link and/or screen shot of a refernce article or book so I can dive into more source material if I wish... just perfect
It's okay to write long. But it needs to feel short by being concise.
You can always tell when someone squeezes a 1000 page book into 200 pages. It feels short and insightful. But when they expand a 20 page book into 200 pages, it feels like fluff. You can tell when that happens too.
A good pattern to observe is an author's first and second best seller.
The first is often amazing. A decade of lessons and insights squeezed into a book. The fast followup is usually fluff. 2 years of add-ons expanded into a full book.