Blog posts are hard for people with completionist tendencies. I start out exploring a topic that sounds interesting - modularity, choosing projects, memory, etc. It turns out reality is fractal and has infinite levels of detail, so literally any topic can be explored from too many angles, in too many words, at too abstract a level. Poor writers like me love falling down these 3 rabbit holes and never leaving them.
But not today. Let’s beat entropy by looking at those 3 excesses in a paragraph each and be done with it.
Too many angles
You can usually develop a whole N-dimensional continuous space of takes on any topic. You can start at one end of the spectrum and move at any level of precision to the other end in most dimensions. The less legible the position you hold on that take-space (because your positions along the axes aren’t clearly identifiable with common signposts, for instance), the more work it is to caveat and explain. If a dimension of a take doesn’t contribute much to the magnitude of your take-vector, ignore it. Call it “take regularization”.
Too many words
Parsimony is hard. Re-read what you wrote, and eliminate unnecessary words. Hell, do it in the middle of writing sentences. Writing less is a heuristic to help you regularize your writing.
Too abstract
General solutions tend toward elegance, reusability, and satisfaction. Remember that reality being fractal means it will be insanely hard for you to smooth out edges and write about general objects that apply to everything. Using examples is informative not only because it will help the reader grasp your meaning, but because it will help you get to the common attributes that matter within your topic of choice. You should regularize, but not to the point where the solution doesn’t fit any specific situation well while uselessly fitting all.
Now I only wish it was that easy.