No one can say just how long a message should be, but you rarely hear complaints about a speech being too short. The amateur worries about what he is going to put in his speech or article. The expert worries about what he should take out.
Interpretation
Effective communication focuses on clarity and brevity, prioritizing what is essential.
In this quote, Edgar Dale emphasizes the importance of conciseness in communication, suggesting that the length of a message is less important than its clarity and relevance. While amateurs may struggle with what to include, experts understand the value of trimming unnecessary content to enhance the impact of their message.
In practice
During a public speaking seminar, emphasizing that shorter speeches often leave a greater impression.
One of the curious things about censorship is that no one seems to believe in it for himself. We want censorship to protect someone else— the young, the unstable, the suggestible, the stupid. I have never heard of anyone who wanted a film or speaker banned because otherwise he himself might be harmed.
IQ tests are routinely used as weapons against Black people in particular and minority groups and poor people generally. The tests are based on white middle-class standards, and when we score low on them, the results are used to justify the prejudice that we are inferior and unintelligent. Since we are taught to believe that the tests are infallible, they have become a self-fulfilling prophecy that cuts off our initiative and brainwashes us.
Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.
As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.
Public school - where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression.
Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
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