If your goals include communicating your ideas to a wide audience, please consider dropping your average sentence length and using sub-headings to encapsulate the core idea of each section. I’m low on intellectual energy today and tried to do my usual thing of skimming an article with a neat title to see if it seems like something I want to engage more deeply with, and the current format basically renders it un-skimmable.
If this is more writing-as-artistic-expression and you don’t mind if it only gets through to people experiencing top-decile mental functioning at the moment they come across it, keep up the good work.
However in my experience if I trim down the sentence to summary-level passages they will lose a lot of meaning (whether intrisic or not) which I’m trying to convey. Nevertheless I’ll take up your suggestion of introducing more subheadings so that the long piece will at least be readable to people skimming the article.
To preserve meaning, have you considered using more repetition? In a situation where jumping straight to the most-precise way to explain a point loses a lot of readers, it can be helpful to restate the same point a several times: Start with the most approachable but least accurate framing, then perhaps critique its inaccuracies as a transition to a less approachable but more accurate framing, and repeat till you’ve built a series of stepping stones from where your reader starts to where you want them to end up.
If your goals include communicating your ideas to a wide audience, please consider dropping your average sentence length and using sub-headings to encapsulate the core idea of each section. I’m low on intellectual energy today and tried to do my usual thing of skimming an article with a neat title to see if it seems like something I want to engage more deeply with, and the current format basically renders it un-skimmable.
If this is more writing-as-artistic-expression and you don’t mind if it only gets through to people experiencing top-decile mental functioning at the moment they come across it, keep up the good work.
However in my experience if I trim down the sentence to summary-level passages they will lose a lot of meaning (whether intrisic or not) which I’m trying to convey. Nevertheless I’ll take up your suggestion of introducing more subheadings so that the long piece will at least be readable to people skimming the article.
Thanks!
To preserve meaning, have you considered using more repetition? In a situation where jumping straight to the most-precise way to explain a point loses a lot of readers, it can be helpful to restate the same point a several times: Start with the most approachable but least accurate framing, then perhaps critique its inaccuracies as a transition to a less approachable but more accurate framing, and repeat till you’ve built a series of stepping stones from where your reader starts to where you want them to end up.