Sending a working person a 14 page letter about anything expecting them to read it is wild to me. Perhaps it's the quality of my writing but my personal experience is that even being way more concise, most people wouldn't care.
Well, how long do we work on some slide decks to convince management? How much we polish them aesthetically? This is a scientist working to convince a management board. So he puts effort in it and tries to make a convincing pitch.
I was fortunate enough to get one of the last physical reward checks which was accompanied by a printout of my e-mail, written on in pencil.
Fortunately, it survived a house flood which destroyed the book it was in, so now the envelope it's in is prominently displayed on a rack in my living room and would be one of the things I'd grab in the event of a fire.
Every so often, when a co-worker knows who Knuth is I bring it in to a workplace to show off.
Extremely envious of this! I don't own a copy of Art of Computer Programming, so I did spend a not-insignificant amount of reading through some of Knuth's other writings trying to find mistakes that no one else has found, and I came up empty handed. There might be mistakes ripe for the picking in there, but I'm afraid I'm not quite smart enough to find them.
Still, a guy can dream. If I ever pick up Art of Computer Programming I might give it a go again.
I once emailed Dijkstra. I was 14, it was the mid 90s, and I had just connected to the real internet a few months ago. I had just come across his name as a prominent computer scientist. I wanted to be one just like him, so I asked him what I should do.
He replied. it was 3 full paragraphs. He told me to study algorithms and to learn python.
I have a blog post by Norvig where he gently chides me for wasting enormous amounts of CPU trying to find a counterexample to the Beale Conjecture.
Not exactly frameable, and not exactly something to be proud of, but I got a chuckle nonetheless.
I bet the editors read it not once, but several times. And I bet it was even noticed years later and posted on websites where many others read it, were impressed, and commented on it. Don Knuth’s letters are special.
It's not a real letter. It's an (implicit?) open letter that is just a self published article, with the hidden threat that everyone will see it [1] so if they don't agree they will look bad.
[1] And nobody will read it, and everybody agree even the publisher. The publisher want to increase the price anyway, and everyone else want a cheaper journal.
Nope :) . I read it now. It's unrealistic. It will leak. Perhaps also he expected someone to read the 14 pages. Let's say it's a not very closed letter :) .
I think times were a little different then; when I had a company begin 2000s, we used to send long emails with details before and after meetings, and there had less and more productive meetings because everyone read these emails/docs. Now I try to send only 1 liners, because people tend to literally only read the first line and then ram the reply button and blurb some studied remark like 'ok'. And then these same folks drag out meetings asking, in a pathetic show of laziness, to 'go over the email'. If there is anything I find cringe, it's 'let's go over the email together'. It's just saying; 'I couldn't be arsed to read it and I want to waste everyone's time'.
Some people think that with quantity they can paint over a lack of substance, others think writing more looks as if they did more work, yet others don't seem to think.. at all.
Bottom line up. Ususally what you need the other side to grok can be summarized in two sentences. Start with that. Give details after. If you have multiple topics seperate them into sections or make a list.
Any message is something the receiver needs to decode into actionable information. Often the receivers don't have any idea where your mind is, so you first need to being them there. The worst kind of message is one where you need to read all the way to the end to even figure out what the heck it is about and then read it again just to get what they want.
I think this might be true if the only goal is to convey information.
Here it is more about convincing others and framing information. If you start with the condensed facts, readers who disagree might be put off already.
His addressees were members of the editorial board. Surely the editorial board should be accustomed to reading lengthy prose?
Now, writing a 14-page letter, of a quality that matches published articles, is what's wild to me.