Nobody finishes reading my books

mrkpdl

Fantastic article, I particularly liked the fist 15 percent of it.

_se

Just like most nonfiction books, this post is a lot longer than it has to be. I think the core idea here is good, but it's pretty ironic that I wanted to stop halfway through. When writing is good, succinct, and to the point, people will finish reading if they're interested in the material. If it's too long, fluffy, repetitive, annoying... people won't. I don't think it's a huge surprise.

falcor84

One thing that I recall reading (but can't find now) is that people are statistically significantly likely to finish books with shorter chapters. It just makes so much sense to me - I want a feeling of accomplishment as I go through the content, with clear stopping points, making it easy to keep going, and also easy to pick up again. My favorite in this regard is Minsky's "Society of Mind" where essentially every chapter/mini-essay is one page, a form which he argued is a good fit for our mental processes.

rossant

Ironically, I read this article from start to finish, something that rarely happens with blog posts, which I usually abandon halfway through. More seriously, I agree that writing short books or articles is an important skill. Writing long is easy; conveying the same amount of information concisely is much harder. It is also a sign of respect for busy readers. I constantly find myself asking LLMs to be shorter, more direct, and more to the point, without fluff. They seem to have a tendency to generate endless streams of words.