Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 12/13/06 23:57

Scripsit fullposter:

> [not native english speaker speaking, ok? - i posted also to another
> group being unsure whether html.critics was more appropriate and yet
> less read than this - so 2 posts on the whole]
>
> Although it may appear speculative, and although i do not put any
> particular trust in newsgroups (meaning that most of the times the
> quality is not very high, but of course one goes for the few good
> posts that may be there), I have a topic that maybe could be of some
> relative interest.
>
> Let's make this short review.

You spent the 15 seconds attention span that you typically get, at best,
from an average reader. At this point, you haven't said a single word about
the subject matter of your message, still less formulated a single statement
about it.

You did manage to insult some people, though.

There's an HTML-related lesson to be learned. People write web pages quite
often as you wrote your message - without even trying to get to the point
during the precious few seconds that you can reasonably expect people to
look at your message.

There's good old advice on writing a column (for a newspaper or equivalent):
start writing, and finish at the end of the paper, then cut off the first
half and throw it away; then work on the remaining text (usually making it
shorter, among other things). This might, with due modifications, be used
when creating short web page, and also when writing a Usenet message that
you regard as important.

So get to the point early. Otherwise there's no reader left when you start
getting to the point.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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