time = life, therefore long winded academic articles = evil

I’ve come to a conclusion that might just prove myself a hypocrite, but I’m going to say it anyways…

People who are unnecessarily long winded, no matter how good their ideas are, are committing a crime.  They waste people’s time and steal their life away from them–especially when the things they write are required reading for other important things.

I’ve come to this conclusion after reading some really fascinating and interesting academic articles for my two poli sci classes.   Some of the ideas they share are very interesting, and some of the qualitative studies in particular are very compelling.  This one article I read (it’s actually a chapter from a book) contained summaries of interviews that the author had with three activists about why they do what they do, and that part of the article honestly had quite an impact on me.

However, when you spend five pages trying to say something that you could say in one, that’s just wrong.  I’ve got more good things to do than I possibly have time to do it in, and even if your ideas are world-changing and paradigm-altering, if you make more demands on my time than you really need, you are sucking the life out of me and taking me away from things that are even better.  That’s just wrong.

Of course, I’m not really good at practicing what I preach.  The novel I’m writing is currently over 108,000 words long, and maybe three quarters finished if I’m lucky.  On this blog, I routinely look back at the stuff I’ve written and say to myself “man, if I were someone else, I wouldn’t read that post because it’s too long.” So, if you accused me of being a hypocrite, you’d probably be right.

In defense of myself, however, I’d say that blogging is fundamentally different from other forms of writing.  By its nature it is more stream of consciousness, and especially with personal blogs, the writing tends to benefit the person who wrote it more than the person who is reading it.  In that way it’s a lot like journal writing–I’ve only reread about 15% of what I’ve written in my journals, but I got something out of the act of writing it.

And as for my novel, well, I can always fall back and say that its just a rough draft.  Besides, I didn’t do a very good job outlining it before I started. =P

However, all of this torture from reading long winded academic articles–even good academic articles with ideas that I love to think about–is really making me think that I need to be more clear and concise in my own personal writing.  So that’s something I’m definitely going to work on right now.