brevity

The most important problem of blog writing is the lack of brevity and relevance. As David Beaver of language log points this here, while comparing blog writing with Grice's Conversational Maxims, he says the main reason of blogs being verbose and not to the point, is the uncertainty of the audience makeup.

In the case of blogs, uncertainty over audience make-up and mores reaches a new high. You could be anybody. In fact, many of you are not bodies at all, but automated web-crawlers. And there simply is no commonly accepted purpose or direction. Bloggers are free to make up purposes and directions as they go, to inform as much as they like about whatever they like in pretty much any way they like.

So, a blog is more whining and ranting, than something that could add value to the reader. And, there is a commonly known tendency for Indians to get verbose. Putting it all togeather, it makes brevity a difficult thing to do for me. Even though the goal of my blog was to deliver my thoughts as short as it could possibly expressed, I have hardly well done.

There is an old story about a famous Tamil speaker. When this speaker was asked to give a speech for ten minutes, he said he needs two days of preparation. When he was asked to give a lecture for two hours, he said that he can start right away. Silence may be golden or even diamond-ish, but being brief is the arduous task of mining the precious stone.