81–90 of 101 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hemingway is not the example you’re looking for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory
I agree but edw519 is a smart guy and I would give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he attempted to capture the essence of a "tl;dr" comment: short, vaguely corresponding to the material, and ultimately misleading.
TLDR: Write like Hemingway, not like Faulkner.
It was: "If you summarize your idea in your first sentence, writing "TLDR" is superfluous."
He wrote the TLDR summary, he just didn't preface it with TLDR.
That to me is the great thing about this article. He's following his recommended practice to illustrate the point.
TL;DR is an inherent criticism of writing that lacks sufficient discernable coherent structure to rapidly assimilate meaning, whether by want of language, typography, or simply cogent thought. There's a lot of sloppy writing on the Internet (and off).
TL;DR is a recognizable convention that serves a purpose. It can be tagged on by others (the way I first saw it used), or be added by the original author, usually in self-deprecating jest, with the meaning of "do you find this too long to read, here's my summary" . Better if people would write clearly in the first place. Surely that's a simple technical problem, no?
TL;DR: Essay misses origins, benefits, and use-conventions of this hack.
TL;DR is, however, remarkably ineffective when it happens to begin every paragraph of an essay. Please avoid this use case.
TL;DR is a useful convention for busy readers, but it should be at the beginning , not the end. Look at the lede (the first sentence or two) of any article in any newspaper. It's marked in bold face, and summarizes the whole story. It helps the busy reader decide if he wants to "drill down" by reading the rest of the article. TL;DR could do the same thing, if only people put it at the beginning . I teach essay writin…
You know, I think you're on to something here, but I believe that on forums such as reddit, the tl;dr is usually read first anyways. People seem to skip to the bottom of a long post to see what the conclusion is.
I don't think this is generally true. The purpose of long form writing is to make the reader draw a conclusion that they may not agree with at the beginning of the article. Studies have shown that once we form a conclusion, we're much less likely to change our minds, so if an article lead with a controversial point we'd internally say "no!" and stick to it rather than letting the article make its point. By not knowin…
To respond to Fusiongyro's point that this is a narrow view I point out that generally in writing style should change with context. In some cases the author of the article is exactly right about summing things up in the first sentence, in others johnfn is.
TLDR: Whether to use tldr depends on what experience you're looking to give your readers, what you're writing about, and who you're writing for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't it be even better if the TL;DR was at the beginning so you didn't have to cmd+F for it?
It would be, but having honing in on a specific set of characters is easier than trying to figure out which one is the summary sentence.
TLDR is a pragmatic device; it's a written discourse marker. Calling it "unnecessary" is just like saying that "well...", "y'know", "so...", "like" and all those other little "filler words" that your high school English teacher doesn't like are "unnecessary". In formal prose, where all that's supposed to matter is textual semantics, sure, they're not necessary, and I wouldn't use them there. But in informal discourse…
Yes, exactly. The "TLDR" is all-caps, so it grabs your eye out of the wall-o-text that you may be skimming over, and says "hey here is my basic point". And maybe then you'll go "hey that's an interesting point" and scroll back up and read their lengthy argument, story, or whatever, in all its labrynthine discoursiveness. And now to demonstrate it I will include some lorem ipsum. Hipster Ipsum, to be precise. Swag pol…
I totally agree with TL;DR usage, it's a modern device for modern internet communication. People continue to use it because it's useful and works, not because they have an agenda to ruin the english language or are semi-illiterate. Possibly my favourite thing about it though is its lack of pronounceability. Its entirely invented and used as a written construct and is actually quite cumbersome to try to say out loud.
TLDR is the common man's academic abstract.