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Summary: (1) EA will be more effective if we learn to be more succinct.  (2) Well-written summaries achieve similar benefits (sometimes). 

 

Reasoning: 

(1) Maintaining nuance is not the same as bloat & unnecessary wordiness

(2) Longer articles/posts mean people skim. 

(3) Longer articles mean people may not read content at all

(4) Or catch the most important parts of it. 

(5) With regards to growing the movement: Good, concise writing captures readers. 

(6) A single (non-obsessive) editing pass that cuts redundancy & wordy sentence structure will save your collected readers more time than it takes you to do the pass. 

Omit needless words. 

(7) Maybe concision is not your strength. In many cases, an executive summary will do similar work (e.g., ensure people catch your key points). See deep's Using the “executive summary” style: writing that respects your reader’s time (somehow not tagged for the redteaming contest, just now referred by me) discusses this in the context of EA research. However, the points are generally applicable to EA writing. The writing advice in the post is great too. 

 

Conclusion:

More concise EA writing will save us all time. It will make good ideas easier to find. 

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Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 8:19 AM

I think the executive summary/conciseness points have been beaten to death. What needs discussion is systems within the EA community that get topics and discussions to the audiences that need to read them for high EV.

Big like.

See also meetings, density, and alternative ways to be short.

(Sidenote, I swear I read a post almost exactly like this 5ish months ago: First writing with excess verbiage, and then demonstrating how to cut it down. But now I can't find it.)