The points made by Ed in the piece are right on; the only thing wrong, as in munch of his fine writing is the length. My breakfast goes cold before the end is reached. The same points could be made more succinctly with due regard to the busy reader.
It's something I hear about and something I wrestle with. I do take it seriously.
But let me start by putting it this way. I could reply to your comment much more succinctly than I will but you might not have liked the two word reply. Instead, I will you an explanation. Read through to the end if you want. Stop at the first of the three numbered bits if that does it for you.
A heads up: Monday, there'll be two pieces, both of them relatively short. You can take either and finish it and your breakfast before your breakfast goes cold. One will be on public finance. The other will be Gerry Byrne and Crown Lands.
That said, let me give you my perspective, looking out, since most of my stuff is longer than what you can get anywhere else.
First, that actually is the point. This isn't news. You want short, go somewhere else. The Telly will give you 500 words on any subject. Your understanding at the end is irrelevant. VOCM does excellent spot news. 30 seconds to a minute tops. Just the highlights. AllNL can do the same. NTV a bit longer, but the same coverage. And there's CBC is you want whatever they are doing. There's a joke in the movie tThe Big Chill. Jeff Goldblum's character writes for People where the editorial rule is to write nothing longer than the average person can read during the average crap.
I don't write to the timing of anyone's bowels.
This is explanation and background and threads. There are layers .Some of the stuff I write is more like a chapter in a book. There's a lot of stuff in a relatively small space. All depends on what you want to compare it to.
Second, none of this is designed to fit one audience. There are people who like long writing. There are people who want bullets. I write to cover all that I want to cover as succinctly and effectively as possible. The are people who've been following me for 20 years. Other readers just started. Sometimes I repeat lines to let everyone catch up or stay with the earlier threads.
Second, if you look at each piece there is a structure. There are segments that look at different aspects of a subject.
With this one, you could stop reading at the first subscription button and frankly, you'd have one conclusion that would do: everyone heard Andrew Furey say we need to do better and elevate the discourse and everyone saw that he couldn't.
The next two segments explore other aspects of the speech. Skip 'em if you want to or if you don't have time.
The last segment goes back to the wider political implications and put this in yet another context, including information about what's on the way that has nothing to do with the speech. You can skip that too, if you want or come back to it later. These are ideas and observations I will bring back later. I try not to drop threads but I give either links or crumbs so you can go back and find the earlier threads if you miss one. The Tony Blair reference is one of those where I gave a link back. There's another one where I didn't but regular readers can figure it out.
Think of them as inadvertent Easter Eggs that go with the pop culture references or the paraphrases of completely unrelated lines from something else. Even if I had not gone back and mentioned the "substantially finished" hospital those lines are there to trigger some. If you get it you get it. If you don't you don't. No harm no foul but there's a lot of stuff going on here and there's plenty for all sorts of people.
Third, while it doesn't always succeed or follow the format ruthlessly, what I try to do with some of these pieces is layer it so if you stopped reading after the first or second segment, you are good to go with enough info to carry on.
In other pieces, the length comes from the need to add more and more info. And always, I try to bring back threads of ideas and show how the one connects to the other.
That basic approach even comes on in shorter pieces. To give you a forecast for Monday, the one on public finance will just be a bullet list of sorts as I go through a few key points to watch and think about.
The Gerry Byrne one will have segments because we have to talk about his changes to the Lands Act and the hype about that, the Auditor General's criticisms of Crown Lands, and then we have to pull together not just that but a couple of other threads from other stories. That one will be longish but the structure will allow you to see as much as you want to see.
And since this stuff doesn't disappear like pixie dust, you can go back and read a piece over a day, or two days. Get the app so if you find yourself waiting at the dentist or having lunch by yourself, you can pull it up and pick up where you stopped reading mid-porridge that morning.
I prefer to read Ed''s posts after breakfast. His pieces are most always too interesting, and often spot on, to try to multitask, lose focus, and miss some of his points. Nowadays there is so much one could read, on national and international stories. But Ed provides insights into local matters, and links to other pieces on issues and topics where there is generally a culture of silence.
Trump does the "weave", with a lot of nonsense. Ed usually connects the dots. I prefer too long over too short.
The points made by Ed in the piece are right on; the only thing wrong, as in munch of his fine writing is the length. My breakfast goes cold before the end is reached. The same points could be made more succinctly with due regard to the busy reader.
Thanks for the feedback, Patrick.
It's something I hear about and something I wrestle with. I do take it seriously.
But let me start by putting it this way. I could reply to your comment much more succinctly than I will but you might not have liked the two word reply. Instead, I will you an explanation. Read through to the end if you want. Stop at the first of the three numbered bits if that does it for you.
A heads up: Monday, there'll be two pieces, both of them relatively short. You can take either and finish it and your breakfast before your breakfast goes cold. One will be on public finance. The other will be Gerry Byrne and Crown Lands.
That said, let me give you my perspective, looking out, since most of my stuff is longer than what you can get anywhere else.
First, that actually is the point. This isn't news. You want short, go somewhere else. The Telly will give you 500 words on any subject. Your understanding at the end is irrelevant. VOCM does excellent spot news. 30 seconds to a minute tops. Just the highlights. AllNL can do the same. NTV a bit longer, but the same coverage. And there's CBC is you want whatever they are doing. There's a joke in the movie tThe Big Chill. Jeff Goldblum's character writes for People where the editorial rule is to write nothing longer than the average person can read during the average crap.
I don't write to the timing of anyone's bowels.
This is explanation and background and threads. There are layers .Some of the stuff I write is more like a chapter in a book. There's a lot of stuff in a relatively small space. All depends on what you want to compare it to.
Second, none of this is designed to fit one audience. There are people who like long writing. There are people who want bullets. I write to cover all that I want to cover as succinctly and effectively as possible. The are people who've been following me for 20 years. Other readers just started. Sometimes I repeat lines to let everyone catch up or stay with the earlier threads.
Second, if you look at each piece there is a structure. There are segments that look at different aspects of a subject.
With this one, you could stop reading at the first subscription button and frankly, you'd have one conclusion that would do: everyone heard Andrew Furey say we need to do better and elevate the discourse and everyone saw that he couldn't.
The next two segments explore other aspects of the speech. Skip 'em if you want to or if you don't have time.
The last segment goes back to the wider political implications and put this in yet another context, including information about what's on the way that has nothing to do with the speech. You can skip that too, if you want or come back to it later. These are ideas and observations I will bring back later. I try not to drop threads but I give either links or crumbs so you can go back and find the earlier threads if you miss one. The Tony Blair reference is one of those where I gave a link back. There's another one where I didn't but regular readers can figure it out.
Think of them as inadvertent Easter Eggs that go with the pop culture references or the paraphrases of completely unrelated lines from something else. Even if I had not gone back and mentioned the "substantially finished" hospital those lines are there to trigger some. If you get it you get it. If you don't you don't. No harm no foul but there's a lot of stuff going on here and there's plenty for all sorts of people.
Third, while it doesn't always succeed or follow the format ruthlessly, what I try to do with some of these pieces is layer it so if you stopped reading after the first or second segment, you are good to go with enough info to carry on.
In other pieces, the length comes from the need to add more and more info. And always, I try to bring back threads of ideas and show how the one connects to the other.
That basic approach even comes on in shorter pieces. To give you a forecast for Monday, the one on public finance will just be a bullet list of sorts as I go through a few key points to watch and think about.
The Gerry Byrne one will have segments because we have to talk about his changes to the Lands Act and the hype about that, the Auditor General's criticisms of Crown Lands, and then we have to pull together not just that but a couple of other threads from other stories. That one will be longish but the structure will allow you to see as much as you want to see.
And since this stuff doesn't disappear like pixie dust, you can go back and read a piece over a day, or two days. Get the app so if you find yourself waiting at the dentist or having lunch by yourself, you can pull it up and pick up where you stopped reading mid-porridge that morning.
I prefer to read Ed''s posts after breakfast. His pieces are most always too interesting, and often spot on, to try to multitask, lose focus, and miss some of his points. Nowadays there is so much one could read, on national and international stories. But Ed provides insights into local matters, and links to other pieces on issues and topics where there is generally a culture of silence.
Trump does the "weave", with a lot of nonsense. Ed usually connects the dots. I prefer too long over too short.