Saturday 11 June 2011

Compact message

Often, which – as a temporal adverb – doesn't say that much because it gives no real clue about the frequency of what is about to follow, people who have been reading my writings, and I guess this applies to most of my blogs and (triggered by the clinical ping announcing the arrival of an unread message in my inbox) even some of my emails, complain about the length and downright complexity of some of the sentences I produce to convey my messages (or even the message itself, although this obviously depends on the kind of books you are used to read – since I would think, for example, that anyone who has enjoyed Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics has wrestled himself through more than one sentence consisting of at least half a page), as they frequently contain long enumerations, references to certain websites and nested structures – using either brackets, quotation marks or, as I just learned from the Wikipedia page covering this particular punctuation mark, one of the many dashes in our language, varying in both their appearance and function – which apparently cover the point I intend to make under a thick layer of irrelevant data (although I deliberately think about any word I put on – the sometimes proverbial – paper), like the crust of our Earth covering important lessons about the history of mankind and its origin (think about fossil sediments or human artifacts from ancient, extinct societies) under a collection of rock strata and volcanic residue, and therefore confuse my readers – sometimes even the most stubborn ones, willing to understand every single thought – ending up in complete despair, lost in transcription, desperately trying to make sense of what they just read by jumping to the beginning and rereading the whole blurb.

I don't know where they get this...

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