Classic problem of our age...

This is a wonderful article on the excesses of our age.

Longing for brevity

Overflow seems to be one of the problems of the age. Sometime in the early 1980s I read an essay claiming that, even by then, the word processor had a lot to answer for. It just encourages writers to go on and on. In the days of the Remington and correction fluid, you thought really hard before committing anything to the typed page, as doing so was such a miserable experience, especially when it involved carbon paper. With the word processor, down it all goes and, more often than not, down it all stays, whether or not it really earns its keep. The author recommended the lapidary style of writing, which is how you would write if you had to carve every word on stone. One has to wonder, for example, whether the Ten Commandments would have been so crisply written if they had first been sent by email attachment.

The problem with the word processor is that there is never a moment when there is a physical cost to keeping something. In the days of manual typing, once you had typed the first draft you made corrections in red. Then blue. Then green. Then brown. And then you couldn't really see where you were any more, so you had to sit down and retype every word. At this point, you would desperately search for words, sentences, even paragraphs to excise to save the pain of retyping. But with the word processor there is never such a moment

I must confess I read this as a blogger if oft to do---mindnumbingly quick...

Do you ever recognize your own faults and flaws, yet are inable to care to overcome them...

sigh...