Oh nice! I like detailed and precise bios. What are your thoughts on viewing length as a cost? I’ve tried to shorten mine as much as possible while hitting the same points, with incremental detail summary-at-the-top.
Funnily enough, I read your bio just a couple of days ago. I very much like the interspersed poetry. These parts especially captured my attention in a good way:
Don’t get yourself in denial thinking it’s impossible to predict, just get arrogant and try to understand
Please critique eagerly—I try to accept feedback/Crocker’s rules but fail at times—I aim for emotive friendliness but sometimes miss. I welcome constructive crit, even if ungentle, and I’ll try to reciprocate kindly.
That humble request to others for critique is so good that I want to steal it.
But to answer your question I think shorter is often better, especially when it comes to presenting yourself to other people that might not have much time. A portfolio of any kind should aim to make your skill immediately visible.
Though the number of words might just be the wrong metric to begin with. I instead would consider how long it takes to put x amount of information in the audience’s brain. They should gain large amounts of “knowledge” quickly. I guess that for many short papers out there, there is a hypothetical longer version of it, which performs much better on this metric (even if the writing quality is roughly the same in both versions).
In the bio, I wasn’t optimizing for the minimum number of words. Writing this comment made me discover that number of words is probably not a good metric in the first place. Thank you for making me realize that.
I just wrote about what felt right. I feel like that worked out pretty well. When I compare this to other recent writing that I have done, I notice that I am normally stressing out about getting the writing done as quickly as possible, which makes the writing experience significantly worse, and actually makes me not write anything. That is, at least in part, the reason why I have only one mediocre AF post.
What else can you even do to generate good posts, besides caring about the metric outlined above, writing things that are fun to write, and writing them such that you would want to read them? Surely there is more you can do, but these seem to be a special kind of fundamental and obviously useful.
Ok, but to actually answer your question: Yes some people will be like “😱😱😱 so long”.
Oh nice! I like detailed and precise bios. What are your thoughts on viewing length as a cost? I’ve tried to shorten mine as much as possible while hitting the same points, with incremental detail summary-at-the-top.
Funnily enough, I read your bio just a couple of days ago. I very much like the interspersed poetry. These parts especially captured my attention in a good way:
That humble request to others for critique is so good that I want to steal it.
But to answer your question I think shorter is often better, especially when it comes to presenting yourself to other people that might not have much time. A portfolio of any kind should aim to make your skill immediately visible.
Though the number of words might just be the wrong metric to begin with. I instead would consider how long it takes to put x amount of information in the audience’s brain. They should gain large amounts of “knowledge” quickly. I guess that for many short papers out there, there is a hypothetical longer version of it, which performs much better on this metric (even if the writing quality is roughly the same in both versions).
In the bio, I wasn’t optimizing for the minimum number of words. Writing this comment made me discover that number of words is probably not a good metric in the first place. Thank you for making me realize that.
I just wrote about what felt right. I feel like that worked out pretty well. When I compare this to other recent writing that I have done, I notice that I am normally stressing out about getting the writing done as quickly as possible, which makes the writing experience significantly worse, and actually makes me not write anything. That is, at least in part, the reason why I have only one mediocre AF post.
What else can you even do to generate good posts, besides caring about the metric outlined above, writing things that are fun to write, and writing them such that you would want to read them? Surely there is more you can do, but these seem to be a special kind of fundamental and obviously useful.
Ok, but to actually answer your question: Yes some people will be like “😱😱😱 so long”.