The blog post I wrote yesterday was really hard to write, as it turned out. There were lots of revisions, and I nearly abandoned it once or twice because it kept going on and on and on. In its final form, it clocks in at about four hundred and fifty words. I’m not saying that’s svelte, exactly, but in one earlier draft, I was pushing well past eight hundred words without an end in sight.

I get caught up a lot over-explaining things when I write. It took me several tries to compress that post’s third paragraph, which outlines the basics of my critique of the new elevator system at my work, down to a relatively compact hundred-plus words. At one point, I was detailing my usability complaints in almost excruciating detail — recounting every minutiae of interacting with the system — the prose equivalent of watching a slow motion replay. It was so bad it was tiring even for me to type it, so be glad I didn’t make you read it.

Why do I do this? I blame design. A lot of my job is about creating visual and interactive presentations that accurately and effectively communicate information. In practice, that often calls for simplicity and explicitness, constantly reminding myself that I must go through great lengths to ensure that users understand every component of the experience I’m constructing.

When I transfer that value to writing though, it seems too often to inspire a long-winded, expository style that feels like homework: laborious, plodding, overly careful. Writing should be fun; the more fun it is, the more fun it’ll be to read. Anyway, it goes back to something Jeffrey Zeldman told me once: it’s a lot harder to make something short than it is to make something long.

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Take a look at this Akismet graph charting the precipitous rise in comment spam across the blogosphere over the past few months, and you’ll see one reason Subtraction.com has been recently besieged by similar problems. Whatever percentage comment spammers are finding in what many might consider a sisyphean activity, it appears to be enough incentive for them to persist, and persist, and persist still, and their commercial litter is everywhere.

I thought I had my comment spam problem more or less locked down late last year, when my friend Su from House of Pretty helped me install AutoBan for Movable Type. That managed to tamp down the flood of comment spam for a while, but as per the aforementioned Akismet graph, the Internet-wide volume of this crap has increased nontrivially in just the past three months.

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