Could I Ever Be Brief?

Brevity and I, for better or worse, are not on friendly terms, as many of my posts clearly indicate. But word has finally gotten around to me that my beloved audience feels that my essays are far too long. My essay on the deficit spanned 4 pages on paper single-spaced, which, in college, would be 8 pages double-spaced.

I realize that hardly anyone has time to sit and read War & Peace on a computer screen. I can't even get through Call of Cthulhu on a computer (I also do not own an e-reader). But the dilemma is this:

I like to write
I try to be complex
I equate "longer" with "better", not for simply writing more (someone could write 1069 pages of nonsense and it would still be garbage1), but because I want to be thorough, and I have a lot to say.

I feel that if I were to shorten it, the quality of this blog would suffer because I would be writing less per post, and you would get Misanthrope: The Abridged Version with some glaring omissions. On top of that, an author naturally views all of his work as equally important, and I don't have an objective editor on hand. It should be noted that the UK Cards Association tried to get the University of Cambridge to take down a student paper that exposed loopholes in the security systems of ATMs (the university's response made me grin ear-to-ear)2. It would be worth mentioning Upton Sinclair in this case, or, in a parallel example, Galileo Galilee, Copernicus, and Charles Darwin. None of my potential editors have the kind of fearless belligerence required.

So editing is out. But the dilemma remains (and, ironically, the length of this essay will probably add to the evidence that I have Diarrhea of the Keyboard). Another problem is that it takes a few paragraphs for me really get rolling. I noticed in my "Response to Henry Giroux..." that it was fairly weak in the beginning. My Christmas essay two weeks ago had the same problem.

Often I write on impulse; I feel as though if I leave it in my head for too long, the ideas get diluted. The writing itself serves as both fuel and the engine by which I continue, and everything starts to flow.

Writing is not so cut-and-and dry. "BE BRIEF!" For some, like my favorite Russians, this is virtually impossible. Twitter gives me only 160 characters, and I can barely fit my title in a post. As a side note, we tell people to compress, and then we lament that they can't write. That's kind of funny to me...Oh wait. I'm only saying that because I love to write. Most people really don't care at all. People normally communicate at the 7th grade level. The last book (chronologically) to impress me in terms of style was The Grapes of Wrath, which was written in 1939. The inadequacies of our educational system are really beginning to show, not just in business communications (see any job advertisement), but even where writing is paramount: In literature. The last place to find decent prose, unfortunately, is in scientific papers, but those are too disinterested and boring for most people.

What I can do is try to outline my posts, but again, it is the writing itself that gets me thinking, much like a snowball.

I also don't believe that it would be wise for me to do this kind of thing for pay. This blog itself is entirely personal, and as much as being paid to write is attractive, creative control would be sacrificed to please a Mr Moneybags who may not have the best intentions in mind, and the quality of this blog--or any other I would maintain--would suffer still.

This blog depends entirely upon me saying what I believe to be true, and pointing it out in a way as to draw the most attention to it as possible. If my ability to speak freely here were ever compromised, I would cease to be interesting, or even become a hypocrite, which is worse.

The only demographic I could ever bend to is my readership, and only in terms of making my posts faster to read or easier on the eyes.

As a solution (I hate that word), I'm going to create two polls and leave each up for one month. First, I want to know if this new color palette is easier for you to read than the old black and white one. The next poll will focus on the length of my posts, because I will only change my writing as a last resort.

1) Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand Signet Classics Edition