Doesn’t everybody skim these days? It seems maybe better for writers to do posts that facilitate skimming, rather than posts that are short/incomplete.
My sense is that when you try to skim, you often miss points.
To the extent that one wants something like that, I’d rather employ features like abstracts, appendices, etc, which allow those who want to spend less time on a post to skip parts of it entirely.
An abstract or summary is a different text. If you want information that’s plausibly in the long version but not in the abstract, then you’re back where you started. If the text is structured to facilitate skimming, you can probably quickly find the stuff you want (and it likely wouldn’t have needed the summary), but if it’s more or less an opaque blob, then “decorating” it with a summary doesn’t make it more usable. Adding large-scale structure doesn’t reduce the importance of small-scale structure.
If there’s several levels of headings, and maybe even highlighted keywords within the text to provide hierarchical structure (or at the very least some anchor points), that makes both skimming and general navigation much easier. This can go all the way to a fairly strict paragraph structure, where the first sentence makes some claim or observation, the following sentences elaborate on that, and the closing sentence of the paragraph wraps up what was said. (In some fields of academia, that seems to be the common style, in others they never even heard of it.) In such a text, you can just read/skim the first sentences of each paragraph and you’ll end up with a pretty clear picture of the whole text. More generally, well-structured texts tend to make it easy to see what parts are less important and which parts you should read fully, even if you’re in a hurry.
While not every text is compatible with strict structure, even just going through at the end and bolding key points can make it easier to navigate – no heavy editing required. (Sure, it’ll look less pretty if there’s 2-3 black blobs scattered about each page instead of everything being a perfectly uniform gray level, but it’s useful and saves time.) Even the already pretty short post here could benefit: Highlighting e.g.
“There is often a strong social pressure to make something ~book length,”
“write a post that covers 90% of the value and is half as long”
“~0.5-1 page per major concept and 1-3 pages per blog post”
“easily be broken into multiple posts”
would mean someone skimming and reading just these short snippets would already get a rough idea of the argument, plus some mitigation strategies. (It may not be 90% of the value in 10% of the time, but it’s probably around 60% of it.) If you need more details, you can just read on past the bold bits, or maybe jump up a few lines and read from there. (That’s a harsh difference to a summary, where you first have to find the spot(s) in the main text that expand on the thing you want to know more about.) Intentional highlighting also gives the author control about what parts will most likely be picked up by someone skimming the text, at least partially mitigating the risk of missing important points.
Doesn’t everybody skim these days? It seems maybe better for writers to do posts that facilitate skimming, rather than posts that are short/incomplete.
My sense is that when you try to skim, you often miss points.
To the extent that one wants something like that, I’d rather employ features like abstracts, appendices, etc, which allow those who want to spend less time on a post to skip parts of it entirely.
An abstract or summary is a different text. If you want information that’s plausibly in the long version but not in the abstract, then you’re back where you started. If the text is structured to facilitate skimming, you can probably quickly find the stuff you want (and it likely wouldn’t have needed the summary), but if it’s more or less an opaque blob, then “decorating” it with a summary doesn’t make it more usable. Adding large-scale structure doesn’t reduce the importance of small-scale structure.
If there’s several levels of headings, and maybe even highlighted keywords within the text to provide hierarchical structure (or at the very least some anchor points), that makes both skimming and general navigation much easier. This can go all the way to a fairly strict paragraph structure, where the first sentence makes some claim or observation, the following sentences elaborate on that, and the closing sentence of the paragraph wraps up what was said. (In some fields of academia, that seems to be the common style, in others they never even heard of it.) In such a text, you can just read/skim the first sentences of each paragraph and you’ll end up with a pretty clear picture of the whole text. More generally, well-structured texts tend to make it easy to see what parts are less important and which parts you should read fully, even if you’re in a hurry.
While not every text is compatible with strict structure, even just going through at the end and bolding key points can make it easier to navigate – no heavy editing required. (Sure, it’ll look less pretty if there’s 2-3 black blobs scattered about each page instead of everything being a perfectly uniform gray level, but it’s useful and saves time.) Even the already pretty short post here could benefit: Highlighting e.g.
“There is often a strong social pressure to make something ~book length,”
“write a post that covers 90% of the value and is half as long”
“~0.5-1 page per major concept and 1-3 pages per blog post”
“easily be broken into multiple posts”
would mean someone skimming and reading just these short snippets would already get a rough idea of the argument, plus some mitigation strategies. (It may not be 90% of the value in 10% of the time, but it’s probably around 60% of it.) If you need more details, you can just read on past the bold bits, or maybe jump up a few lines and read from there. (That’s a harsh difference to a summary, where you first have to find the spot(s) in the main text that expand on the thing you want to know more about.) Intentional highlighting also gives the author control about what parts will most likely be picked up by someone skimming the text, at least partially mitigating the risk of missing important points.