Overly wordy, lazily formatted or wall o'type posts will dilute the radial power of a thread.

[RunningDeer]

Posted by Hervé (here)
Sorry RunningDeer, I mistakenly assumed you were talking to us, forum "Admins"...

One thing to keep in mind with Paula's creative solution if applied by anyone on this here forum is that such separators will be counted as one of the "9 (nine) Pictures/videos/smilies/emojis limit in a post.

Happy page-layouts, all

The post was intended for both the forum and administration. I viewed the thread as community coming together to brainstorm and share tips.

I forgot that each time one uses a paragraph indention gif/smilie, it’d count towards the nine limit. Thanks for the reminder, Hervé.

[Ernie Nemeth]

I have been thinking about what constructive and hopefully helpful hint I could add to this thread. I thought the best way I can help is to remember what I went through when learning how to write. For me, getting beyond correct spelling and grammatical errors, the greatest problems were rambling sentences and staying on topic. I found sticking to the five paragraph rule helps in this regard.

Rambling sentences often arise when I am not certain of my point or I am not clear in conveying my point. In such a case I will break the phrases into partial sentences and clarify my thrust as if reading bullet points, fleshing out each phrase into a sentence.

But the most irksome for me was never getting back to the original idea. My posts still often continue until I reach the point that the last sentence refers back to the first in some way.

In school we were taught the five paragraph rule. The first paragraph should inform the reader of the main points about to be offered and a summary of the basic thrust of the writing. The next three paragraphs should flesh out the points being emphasized. And the final paragraph should be reserved for conclusions based on the points described and the premise.

I hope this has helped a bit. The main point is to fit the idea into a format that clearly designates a structure for or an aid to writing a more pertinent and salient post. By sticking to the five paragraph structure you get: opening statement, premise, argument, conclusion in a nice tidy package each time.

[Foxie Loxie]

Hey Ernie! Sounds like Homiletics!!

[Daozen]

5 paragraphs seems about right. There's also the guideline: i) Tell them what you're going to say, ii) say it, iii) tell them what you've just said.

My sentences can be rambling too. I have a simple rule; less commas, more full stops. Harold Pinter and Strunk + White are good teachers:

https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Strunks-rules

- Choose a suitable design and hold to it.
- Make the paragraph the unit of composition.
- Use the active voice.
- Put statements in positive form.
- Use definite, specific, concrete language.
- Omit needless words.
- Avoid a succession of loose sentences.
- Express coordinate ideas in similar form.
- Keep related words together.
- In summaries, keep to one tense.
- Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.

One of the reasons 'the bad guys' are powerful on this planet, and 'the good guys' are not as powerful, is that the bad guys respect the human need for good design, good colors, succinct phrasing and compositional balance. Look at adverts. Whether you like the brands or not, Porsche and Benetton adverts are high art. What if more freedom-oriented people climbed down off their horses and respected the physical laws of this world. We are creatures made of flesh. We need to eat 2-3 meals a day, and drink 3-4 liters of water. This is non-negotiable. Likewise, the human need for clarity and balance is also borderline non-negotiable.

I've worked part time/studied programming for the last 3 years. I can't tell you the amount of talented programmers I've seen who build an app/website and can't get any users. Why? Because they can't choose good colors, make good design or write good copy. These guys spend 6 months burning the midnight oil, building a huge corporate SaaS (software as a service) site or Android app. But their design is terrible. So no users, and thousands of man hours down the drain. I honestly think there's a type of arrogance there. These guys are highly paid. One was on $100-$300 per hour. They've got cash, but are too proud to hire a designer/UX expert to give them a one hour session telling them how to improve their site. They call it engineer's disease.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812975

[RunningDeer]

Posted by Daozen (here)
Harold Pinter and Strunk + White are good teachers:

free pdf - "The Elements of Style"

[A Voice from the Mountains]

Posted by Ewan (here)
I would say adaptation is a necessity for survival, so for the adaptee it is certainly good, but I don't see this (a change in linguistic norms) as an adaptation. Quite frankly I see it as a degradation. A backward step.

Every older generation says that as the new comes in, and yet we have all managed to survive.

The Romans complained about the vulgar common tongues replacing Latin. The English have constantly complained about their ever-changing language throughout history.

You can choose to be glum about all the increasing use of acronyms but it won't put the genie back into the bottle.

Was it planned, merely accidental, evidence of absorbing? technolgy from elsewhere, or is it an agenda?

I don't believe it's possible to plan popular culture in advance. You can try to manipulate it, and I believe that occurs all the time, but people have ways of seeing through manipulations and working around them. You can never fully control the thoughts and feelings of the great mass of people without some Matrix-like scenario already in place, which, btw, government "good boy points" would go a long way towards establishing, along with replacing all of your personal responsibilities with robots, making you truly a useless eater.

As the human capacity for rational thought degrades and the capacity for AI to operate with increasing lucidity? improves we are on a very dangerous downward spiral.

I'm still not sold on the idea that an increasing use of acronyms and Internet slang in general is a degradation or a downward spiral. I'm sold that you believe that, but not that it's actually true.

tl;dr, as one example, immediately jumps out to me as "hey, if you're not going to read the wall of text, at least read this brief synopsis."

Except without having to use all those damn words.

This is why we invent words (and acronyms) in the first place: to save time. Why is that a degradation again?

Rather it seems to be the entire point of this thread: brevity.

[Ewan]

Posted by A Voice from the Mountains (here)

Posted by Ewan (here)
I would say adaptation is a necessity for survival, so for the adaptee it is certainly good, but I don't see this (a change in linguistic norms) as an adaptation. Quite frankly I see it as a degradation. A backward step.

Every older generation says that as the new comes in, and yet we have all managed to survive.

The Romans complained about the vulgar common tongues replacing Latin. The English have constantly complained about their ever-changing language throughout history.

You can choose to be glum about all the increasing use of acronyms but it won't put the genie back into the bottle.

Was it planned, merely accidental, evidence of absorbing? technolgy from elsewhere, or is it an agenda?

I don't believe it's possible to plan popular culture in advance. You can try to manipulate it, and I believe that occurs all the time, but people have ways of seeing through manipulations and working around them. You can never fully control the thoughts and feelings of the great mass of people without some Matrix-like scenario already in place, which, btw, government "good boy points" would go a long way towards establishing, along with replacing all of your personal responsibilities with robots, making you truly a useless eater.

As the human capacity for rational thought degrades and the capacity for AI to operate with increasing lucidity? improves we are on a very dangerous downward spiral.

I'm still not sold on the idea that an increasing use of acronyms and Internet slang in general is a degradation or a downward spiral. I'm sold that you believe that, but not that it's actually true.

tl;dr, as one example, immediately jumps out to me as "hey, if you're not going to read the wall of text, at least read this brief synopsis."

Except without having to use all those damn words.

This is why we invent words (and acronyms) in the first place: to save time. Why is that a degradation again?

Rather it seems to be the entire point of this thread: brevity.

Ah, my comment regarding a degradation of the language was not in relation to acronyms, though I can see why you would draw that conclusion based on preceding posts, but rather the brevity of language employed on social media.

It seems nobody wants to take the time anymore to consider anything, and they have scant chance to when everything is presented in little more than soundbytes. How can you reach any kind of informed conclusion from a mere one sentence comment.

The discussion is reduced to a game, (think tennis, back and fore, back and fore), rather than a discourse, an exchange of ideas, opinions. Why is time so precious in such a scenario that one can't put a little effort in, is it so important to get to the next 300 tweets before bedtime?

Something like a Tower of Babel incident MkII. The communication is empty, devoid of reason, a babble of noise.

Or maybe I'm just out of touch and being left behind.

I looked around the train tonight on the way home, the closest 10 people to me were all heads down swiping and scrolling. Were they learning something, perhaps. Were they missing something, I think so.

[A Voice from the Mountains]

There is definitely an overload of info today, and it’s not possible to follow up on the details of every claim or idea we come across.

We might see a short tweet with a claim. That claim might lead us to a much more in depth academic paper published in a journal with all of the relevant technical details. But this paper won’t be of interest to some people who will just never read it, and really we don’t all have time to read in depth on every subject.

So we have to figure out some way to prioritize what data is most important to us and take our chances with the rest, unless/until that other info also rises to a higher priority to investigate.

In the past, things were slower, news came less often and we had more time to think about it. Not so much anymore! There’s no time to digest one thing before the next comes along.

[wnlight]

I would not like that anyone be forced to change his or her writing style in order to please Avalon members. I have always thought that one should write as s/he wishes here.

I always skip posts that include only an Internet link with no description or encouragement to pursue. And I nearly always ignore posts that are a wall of text with little or no white space. I simply think "Bless you" and move on. I assume that those posts are for the enjoyment of someone else. :-)