Answers that are too long, drawn out and contain too much excess theory

Question

Many answers I've seen are dauntingly written out like a college homework assignment when 2-3 sentences at the most would have sufficed. Shouldn't we aim for conciseness and develop skills to articulate answers that say a lot with less words? If a user is concerned with the excess baggage, he/she can use google and drown in these 200 - 300 word explanations. But not here.

Example: A question I answered in 1 - 2 sentences where others wrote full essays.

Transfer nearly an entire file system to a fresh install as smoothly as possible

Answer 1

Fine. Concise.

As a question-answerer, I see three types of questions:

• Ones I can answer right away with a "here do this"
• Ones I could answer if I had the right OS, hardware, etc. and lots of time, but can approximate a workable answer
• Ones I can't answer directly but can puzzle out an approach to an answer, and let the querant figure out the mechanics

If nobody has answered with a "here do this", and if I can't answer with a "here do this", two possibilities remain:

• Don't answer at all
• Try to help by providing sound reasoning towards a solution

Questions for you:

1. Which alternative from the above two bullets would you prefer?
2. How many more questions on SU would go completely unanswered/uncommented if we only ever answered with a "here do this"?
3. Is it more helpful to a user to provide them with a direction toward a solution, or to let their question sit quietly with no help whatsoever?
4. How many more questions on SU would go completely unanswered because people answering questions don't have the time/hardware/software configurations to provide a "here do this" answer?
5. How much valuable educational material would be lost if long answers with useful concepts were never articulated?

(Was that concise enough for you?)

Answer 2

Shouldn't we aim for conciseness and develop skills to articulate answers that say a lot with less words?

Of course you should always strive for conciseness. This is one of the number one rules of scientific writing—or writing in general if you want to keep your readers' attention. If I've learned something here, it's cutting out the irrelevant parts, or "bullshit", as you call it.

But you seem to be confused about two different dimensions, one being concise vs. excessive, the other being incomplete vs. detailed.

The former is the difference between merely explaining and explaining as well as saying hello, Merry Christmas, linking to your homepage, including a footer with your signature, emoticons, et cetera. The latter is what makes an effortless answer stand out from the rest, which leave no questions open, go beyond what's asked and are among the top posts on Stack Exchange sites as a whole.

Which brings me back to your first point:

Many answers I've seen are dauntingly written out like a college homework assignment when 2-3 sentences at the most would have sufficed.

Are you saying there couldn't have been two or three summarizing sentences? Why not? Many users like to put a TL;DR in front of their posts.

And if you think a post is missing precisely that, why not include it? There's an edit button below the post. For anyone. You don't even have to be signed in. Or, if you're an experienced Stack Exchange member, drop a comment. Ask for clarification or an example.

Finally there are topics that simply cannot be explained in a single line of code. I often found myself looking for solutions to programming problems, and—guess what—the one-liner on Stack Overflow really didn't help much. It was the answer that explained how the code behind worked and how the commands played together. Which made me learn something for a lifetime instead of just copypasting and forgetting.

Answer 3

Short is not always helpful...

Answer 4

Well, there needs to be a balance between verbosity and conciseness. I personally tend to like to start off with the 'simple' answer, then go into details - which I think are vitally important.

Details are important though. while 2-3 lines may solve that issue, in depth answers mean that there may be clues to similar or indepth issues. In some answers the process is as important as the answer.

Couple of examples - the famous/infamous charecter count question where there were a bunch of different methods with different alternatives. The best answer, IMO showed which method was the best in addition to what would have been a one line answer.

In some cases context is necessary to get to the core of the problem - in this case the 'history' of ATA was entirely relevant to getting the answer - with three different versions of the standard in play!

In your specific case I actually liked the 'essay' answer better.

1. It covered several options and the advantages and disadvantages of each
2. He actually covers recovery as an alternative to nuke and pave
3. Its written in a formal tone.

I do note though the question lacked information that would have made a proper, in depth answer difficult and Synetech's answer covered many of the bases.

Answer 5

Many answers I've seen are dauntingly written out like a college homework assignment when 2-3 sentences at the most would have sufficed.

They would have sufficed to solve the problem. However, they often don't explain why it solves the problem and how one came to that solution. I could give you a fish, but that doesn't mean you're suddenly able to fish...

The extra information is thus not necessarily "excess baggage" or "dauntingly written"; okay, there are users that are not going to be interested in reading all that extra stuff because they are ignorant, but those that do usually learn something along (assuming it goes into details and not into a story).

Shouldn't we aim for conciseness and ...

I read this as "Should we not learn how we got to the solution and give extra details?" I vote no.

... develop skills to articulate answers that say a lot with less words?

This naturally would introduce ambiguity, lack of details, lack of explanation and more.

If a user is concerned with the excess baggage, he/she can use google and drown in these 200 - 300 word explanations. But not here.

What if Google does not explain it that well? Or does not answer the exact same problem?

Example: A question I answered in 1 - 2 sentences where others wrote full essays.

Well, seems you fulfilled his "Anyways, quick responses would be super nice!" condition; since you were short and only gave a single example, we can't really learn or conclude anything from this.