The Return of 'Write Less, Do More' by Rich Harris | JSCAMP 2019

Shakespeare was the name of our content management system it only really ran in Internet Explorer I was working as a reporter at a financial news outlet in South London couple of miles from where this mural now sits and in 2010 we relaunched our website one of the requirements of the new designer is that we should be able to reshape the article pages and the home pages without the dev

team needing to do a release so a brilliant engineer named Kane wrong brill an extension to Shakespeare that allowed us to reshape the world by editing what are essentially HTML templates naturally enough it was called globe after the theatre that Shakespeare's company of actors built now as someone who worked in the newsroom and also sort of understood what a div was I was somehow the least unqualified person to use globe and so the company had no option but to put me in charge of producing one of our verticals and for a while it was pretty

great it allowed us to be wrong more responsive to our readers it meant that we could do things that would previously have taken weeks of meetings during the week we could have a steady stream of breaking news like this and then of the weekend we could showcase our long reads and our features the traffic numbers going in the right direction everyone was happy but before long our reach began to exceed our grasp we wanted to do more interactive and rich things on the web and all I knew about doing interactive stuff on the web was that you did it with flash which was

very much a part of internet culture at the time and used to make things like this but something terrible had happened flash had been murdered by the tyrant Steve Jobs rest in peace and so to cut a long story short I started researching alternatives and that's how I found myself writing a language called JavaScript into a text box in a content management system that only really worked in Internet Explorer and I think we even had monospace fonts much less syntax highlighting or linting

or anything like that and the results were entirely predictable I broke things badly and often what the dev team should have done was sanitized my marker stripped out my script tags but instead and I'll forever be grateful to this for this my friend Pete Louis came to me and said rich I'm probably going to regret telling you this but there's this thing that we used to write better JavaScript it's called jQuery and in that moment my changed I went to jQuery comm and my mind exploded into a thousand pieces all of a sudden all of the things the

pie-in-the-sky ideas that we'd wanted to do were not just possible they were within reach I fell in love with jQuery and the reason that I fell in love with it with these four words write less do more my name is rich Harris I'm a graphics editor at the New York Times and this talk is called the return of write less do more part 1 write less so there aren't many rules when it comes to writing prose but this is one of the ones that pretty much everyone agrees on

wherever possible you should strive to omit all the various repetitive redundant on needless parts of a piece of writing and only keep words that can be useful information or in other words omit needless words this is one of the rules from a very famous book called The Elements of Style otherwise known as Strunk & white after its authors and it continues thusly vigorous writing is concise a sentence should contain no unnecessary words a paragraph no unnecessary sentences for the same reason that a drawing should not have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts this requires not that

the right to make all his sentences short order you to avoid all detail and treatise subjects only in outline but that every word tell and this isn't just about respecting your readers time it's about writing things that are more correct flabby prose create space for the more words that you have the more you're able to paper over all of the logical cracks that would otherwise leap out at you and having produced some short concise writing it's much easier for your reader to understand you now I've been working for most of my career the intersection