Short (meta) blog post about what kind of educational materials I prefer, and why:
I generally prefer learning material that is impersonal, and doesn’t contain author-specific idiosyncrasies. When I’m reading or watching something, I’m not interested in hearing the author give a ‘performance’, I’m typically interested strictly in the key information being conveyed. As such, I don’t like seeing jokes, quirky formulations or other similar things through which the author seemingly seeks to show off their personality, because that just serves as a distraction from the (supposedly) important information.
That’s the approach I like to see, and that’s the approach I try to employ as much as possible. When I write something, I want to respect the reader’s time. Therefore, I try to iterate on paragraphs/chapters/etc. until the information is very, very clear. After that, I try to reduce the size of the material as much as possible while keeping the clarity constant.
So, with this approach, jokes or other such things have no place in the material. I’m not trying to rhetorically impress you, I’m not trying to show off my personality or my quirks. I’m only trying to lay out some information that hopefully is a bit useful to you (at the very least), and do so with as much clarity and conciseness as possible.
And just to be extra clear: I’m not saying that this approach is better than others in an objective sense. I’m only saying what subjectively works better for me.
A good example of this style is TCP/IP Illustrated by Kevin R. Fall & W. Richard Stevens. I’ve been reading Volume I for a while and from early on in the book I was really impressed by the style of writing and how easy it was to follow.