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Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote highlights the pitfalls of overindulgence in digital communication and writing.

P. J. O'Rourke emphasizes that in the realm of cyber-assisted authorship, there is a tendency for writers to sacrifice quality for speed and quantity. He compares this behavior to rambling and going off-topic, suggesting that such tendencies detract from effective communication and thoughtful writing.

Themes

SpeedQuantityWritingCommunicationTechnology

In practice

Example use cases

In a workshop on effective writing, this quote can be used to urge participants to focus on clarity over churn.

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Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
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Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
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I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
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Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
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The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
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Quote by P. J. O'Rourke | QuoteProject