Why Do We Babble?

Why is it when describing something, we babble and talk a lot without going to the point?

It is because we don’t have a lot of time. It’s true. When we don’t have a lot of time, we tend to blabber a lot. Conversely, writing or talking concisely, requires a lot of thinking. A great song for example, will move us within the time it is played. It might be long, but it is not too long that we fall asleep.

I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Mark Twain

I find it amusing that sometimes people are proud that a certain product, book or document is certain pages long, where the number is outrageously high for that kind of document. Sometimes, they are very good and worth the length, while others are too long for their own good. Example of the former would be the book “Gone With The Wind”, while the later is Harry Potter’s last book.

Even in technical writing, the same happens. Have you seen long manuals? And if you try to write one, you would understand how it is so easy to do so. The writer almost always wants to tell everything, because he/she is worried that something is missed out. But actually, most things NEED to be left out, because they are just noise. Great manuals are short, and some of the time, wordless.

But to create a short and concise manual, requires a good design, one that handles most of the explaining by having a good design. So you see, in order to not blabber, we have to not only think long and deep, but also think it allll the way from the start.

Most of the time we don’t have that much time, so we wrote a long one. Just like this post. Hope this blabber makes sense.

Thank you for reading.