Anti-Climacus

In the Mad Men episode "The Summer Man," Don, writing in his journal, says he's never written more than 250 words in his life. The episode intends us to think, like Don, that this is a great indictment of his work ethic. However, one would think that an ad man, of all people, would understand that brevity is a great problem--writing less is always harder than writing more.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying I have spent the afternoon working on a 200-ish word summary of the freshman seminar I mentioned yesterday, these 200 words posing substantial difficulty. I've written about 1200 words, in four or five different drafts, and finally have it pared down to 250 or so I find mostly acceptable. It has to appeal to freshmen, sound interesting, outline the content of the course, and make an appeal to relevancy. This has mostly be a test of how many adjectives I happen to know.

I will be glad to return to problems which require 3000 words to be resolved.