How often do you arrive at the end of reading a scientific article or grant application and feel devastated that it had not been longer? How often do you jump up from your desk and rush to find colleagues to share with them this uplifting document so they might also experience your joy? I imagine you would have to answer, "Not often." Instead, do you as a reader not tend to feel relief when you reach the document's end? You are probably more tired than you were when you began. That fatigue is not only a problem in itself: It signifies a great probability that, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, you have failed to perceive the writer's intended meaning clearly and with as little effort as possible. It is the writer's job to convey meaning; it is the reader's job to perceive meaning. If the writer has not performed their job adequately, the reader may well come away with an entirely different meaning than the writer intended. If the reader arrives at the end of the sentence having received something, even a muddy, loosely defined something, the reader has every reason to believe the reading job has been adequately accomplished. In parallel fashion, since the writer knew what the sentence was intended to mean, and the sentence seemed capable of meaning that, containing all the correct and pertinent information, the writer may also be well satisfied that the writing job has been accomplished.
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