wiki_z: SecretsOfThePaddingMasters

What's the market value of a clever short story? Next to nil compared with a 500-page novel, no matter how pedestrian the prose of the longer work. Likewise a truly useful one-page quick-reference sheet nets the author zilch in contrast to a weighty tome containing not one iota of additional information. And when you have a major term paper assigned three months ago and due tomorrow — but your fingers have yet to touch the keyboard — five paragraphs of brilliance will still send your GPA into a nosedive; 30 pages of copy/paste drivel may, with typically careless grading, keep your nose above water.

So who but a fool would write with brevity? Ah, you may object: "Longer items take longer to write. I don't have time to crank out the words." Not so! Once you've learned the Secrets of the Padding Masters, you'll laugh at publisher's deadlines ... you'll chortle when the rest of the class groans about homework ... you'll stay up late drinking with your buddies rather than fret about the memorandum that your boss expects to see by 10am tomorrow. "No problem!" you'll reply to every ridiculous new requirement for documentation or expanded discussion.

Just glance at this excerpt from the Table of Contents of Secrets of the Padding Masters:

Chapter One: Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy
Chapter Two: The Wonders of W h i t e s p a c e
Chapter Three: An Aside on Digression and Self-Interruption
Chapter Four: Redundancy Revisited
Chapter Five: Structure Over Substance
- The Use of Sub-Sections
  - How to Abuse Sub-Sub-Sections
  - How Not to Abuse Sub-Sub-Sections
- Further Notes on Form
- Lists, Outlines, and Tabulations
- Titles, Headlines, Footers, and Sidebars
Chapter Six: Your Friend, Mr. Thesaurus
Chapter Seven: Flights of Fancy: Metaphor and Imagery in Nonfiction
Chapter Eight: Forewords, Prefaces, Acknowledgments, Credits, Bibliographies, Indices, Appendices, and Addenda
Chapter Nine: The Pleasures of Plagiarism
Chapter Ten: Ellipses and ...
Chapter Eleven: Self-Reference (q.v.)
Chapter Twelve: Fun with Fonts
Chapter Thirteen: More Thoughts on Redundancy
Chapter Fourteen: Restating the Problem
Chapter Fifteen: Eye Candy = Irrelevant Illustrations
Chapter Sixteen: Creative Quotation
Chapter Seventeen: The Fine Art of Footnoting and Endnoting
Chapter Eighteen: Precision: The Bane of Brevity, Except in Cases which are Very Simple (Provided that the Description of Said Cases is Simple as Well) and in Cases where Established Technical Terminology Has Already Been Defined for the Target Audience to Denote the Concept in Question

And this is merely a glimpse of the barest tip of the iceberg; the three-volume series contains much much much (much) more! Just send $129.95 to P. O. Box 598, Kensington, Maryland 20895, USA and by return mail in a plain unmarked envelope you'll receive this unrivaled roadmap to textual enhancement. And what's more, if your order arrives before the end of the month you'll also get a complete CD set of the companion 72-hour audio course How to Filibuster: A Fulsome Guide to the Fine Art of Speechifying — for no additional charge! (Nominal shipping and handling fees may appear on your bank statement sporadically during the subsequent year. Please ignore them.)

Yes, you too can soon become a veritable Vicar of Verbosity ... a wily Wizard of Wordiness ... a prime Paragon of Prolixity — if you Act Now!!

TopicHumor - TopicLiterature - 2006-11-27

(correlates: PyramidPeaking, NecessityAndSufficiency, TooYoung, ...)