How is a poster like a sonnet?

Our astronomer struggles to fit into a limited space.

As we mentioned last week, our astronomer is presenting a poster paper at next month’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society.  Now, a poster paper is a very specialized kind of communication.  In a space of about three by four feet it shows the result of some scientific research; it must expect to be viewed from a distance of maybe five feet (unless the reader becomes particularly interested).  That means much less writing than even a brief printed scientific paper, maybe as much as an average blog post.  Visuals included (for posters they’re much more important than print), that’s a very tight restriction.  His poster now almost complete, our astronomer has spent most of his time cutting and condensing.  This was expected.

In any form of writing, or indeed any kind of communication, it is much harder to say something in a small amount of space.  Only the most important ideas can be chosen, only the most concise wording allowed.  It requires a certain ruthlessnes.  And, if the result is not to be disjointed and opaque, it requires a great deal of time and thought.  It’s harder than writing without a limit.  (Our writer thinks that’s probably why excellent poems are so rare, and why the proportion of unreadable poems is so high.)

And it requires humility.  All scientists are keenly interested in their own research–they wouldn’t do it, otherwise.  The temptation is to discuss at length the progress, setbacks, insights, the whole thing, all of vital interest to the author.  But the audience is not as interested.  Our astronomer long ago realized that there is nothing he can say to justify going five minutes over his alloted time in a verbal presentation.  (Unfortunately, the speakers who understand this are few.  In any field.)  Anyone who wants more detail will contact him afterwards.  The same sort of thing applies to written communication.  Cramming extra detail onto a poster only makes it harder to read, and less likely to be read.

Our writer considers that this applies to every form of writing.  Even the three-volume novel must leave something out.  In his 1965 foreward to his The Lord of the Rings (which passes a thousand pages, all told) J. R. R. Tolkien notes as a defect that it is “too short.”  For those who come to love the world he created and want more, that’s true.  But as a story anything longer would be unmanageable, and additional material (of which he had a copious amount) eventually found its way into other books.

Our astronomer has declined the challenge of our writer to present his research in the form of an Alexandrine sonnet.  This time.