Friday, 5 February 2021

5 indicators that an article is not worth reading

You've seen them often enough. They lure you in with a promise of fulfilling your heart's desire, empowering you and transforming your management/IT/tap-dancing skills. Follow this simple guide and save hours of frustration. You can avoid wasting your life exposing yourself to someone's Google adword farm. Watch for these tell-tale signs....

A complex discussion is decomposed into a small number of bullet of bullet points (5 seems particularly popular). The prose is presented as rambling text, usually 2-3 screenfuls when a bullet point layout would have taken a fraction of the space and less of your time.

The N points only address a subset of problem context from a unilateral viewpoint

The article spends more time discussing a specific solution than the problem
or even how the solution addresses the problem. It certainly never, ever compares alternative approaches.

Buzzwords - "Successful", "Must Read", "master"

It never links to authoritative sources.

It's just getting to the point where you might learn something you didn't already know when

No comments:

Post a Comment