26 Comments

One of my more successful routines while teaching English to German business personnel was to take a sentence, any sentence, supplied by the client and reduce it, one superfluous word after another, until it was impossible to eliminate any further words without changing the meaning. Especially useful for speechwriting, I found.

Expand full comment

What a good exercise!

Expand full comment

Agree with you on many of the books you list. I’m trying to read The Karamazov Brothers , not really enjoying it or for that matter , understand it. I used to have a 30 page rule ... if I couldn’t get into a book after 30 pages, I’d discard it. But I’m trying to persevere in this case , dunno why really. Perhaps there will be an epiphany towards the end. Or maybe I just don’t have the concentration span anymore (which is true)

Expand full comment

So many books .... only one life to live. Weed out the crap ones

Expand full comment

When promoting the readable, ignore the pseudo-intellectual.

On occasional advancement of discourse, saturated with circumspection and deeply proficient, but manifestly authored, draw upon inner-resources and reflect that an impression riven from the immediate thing possessed in fact, as opposed to a thing about which one is still speculating, may be worth a brace in the chaparral and the intellectual obscurant may safely be rendered secondary in one’s estimation.

Expand full comment

hahahahahahaha

Expand full comment

So very true. “I’m sorry my report is a bit late, boss. I had to write it shorter”..

Expand full comment

🤣

Expand full comment

Somewhat related, whenever I've tried asking ChatGPT for help with my writing it ends up picking sentence structures and words that "aren't me" and my writing communicates less clearly

Sometimes a ChatGPTification leave my writing sounding like the character Moss from the IT crowd, especially if talking about technology or coding.

In the end, found the AI more of a hindrance than a help, but I do worry about the thousands of emails, comments, instant messages and even books which will have been written yet contain such little information.

Expand full comment

Yes, the re-writes can take as long as if you had just written it yourself in the first place

Expand full comment

Something to ponder,

I’ve not a clue who you are, what your history is, truly I don’t know why I should read your writing. Yet I do.

It’s the clarity, inherent truth, and perhaps your personality that I find value.

Congrats on finding a new customer by having solid values and living them.

Expand full comment

Many thanks. You are very kind.

Expand full comment

Absolutely agree with this. Fifty percent of professional joke writing is spent removing fifty percent of the words.

Expand full comment

The tragedy of modern times; short slogans, memes and tweets get Democrats, Socialists, Marxists, Labour and communists elected, which is why China is pushing TikTok. Long essays butter no parsnips! Competition for you Dominic, Jordan is concise here > https://www.dossier.today/p/what-we-learned-at-davos-2024-global

Expand full comment

thank you - i shall read

Expand full comment

There’s a scene in the film, The Hours, where Virginia Woolf’s character realises that publishers would select writers if they used words the publisher didn’t know.

I wonder if there’s a modern equivalent...

Expand full comment

How funny! I bet there is …

Expand full comment

It’s absolutely a believatrusim.

Expand full comment

You've got yourself selected

Expand full comment

I find Jordan Peterson’s books hard to read.

Compare that to how he speaks in interview (ignoring that he’s often baited) and it’s engaging and compelling.

Not sure why he doesn’t write the same way as he speaks.

Expand full comment

Yes, I was the same. I only got about a chapter or two into 12 Rules before I gave up

Expand full comment

Sad. Rule three was ‘Never give up. ‘

Expand full comment

hahahhaha

Expand full comment

There’s a saying in marketing: simplify for free, complicate for profit. I wonder did all those on the free path just give up because it wasn’t making them any money.

Expand full comment

What an interesting thought. I love that saying

Expand full comment

You wrote you are writing about gold go to roadtoroota.com Bix Weir is a silver guy becauses he has done the research and found silver is finite and we're being lied to about shortages of gold. Powell telegramed/communicated to DC of his find of gold artifacts in the caves of he Grand Canyon and was in an article in I believe th NY Times. The Boston Federal Resrve wrote the cartoon Road to Roota while Green Span served in the federal resservation and wrote the algorythms for the fininancial system. Keep up the good work as we need writers such as you to expose the truth of the matter.

Expand full comment