2016-02-03

Clarity

In which I establish a new blog post guideline for improving expositional clarity.

Recently I read a very good but lengthy article in which the thrust of the argument was made in the last half. That meant that the reader would have to be very interested in the argument's background information in order to justify reading all the way through to the end, where the main point would be found.

Honestly, I browsed the article, missed the point, and then later realized I had to re-read the article more carefully, and in its entirety in order to understand.

This made me wonder how many times I've done something similar in my blog posts. Since I often refer to my own posts later on, I realized that in some cases I might have to read all the way through to determine whether the post contained the information I wanted to convey. That's inefficient.

So as of today, I'm going make an effort to solve that problem. I'll write my blog posts as usual, then add a blurb at the top, in italics, to summarize what the post is about.

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