I need some help. I have a lot of online research resources for a book project. Some of the material is saved on a word processor and the rest online on Favorites and Bookmarks. I want to digitally organize the material to facilitate the drafting of the book. What do I do? I am looking at Deli.cio.us, a Social Bookmarking application regarding this. Is it ok or there is a better way?

We need to make sure articles are not only easy to read, but also easy to skim. Big chunks of text make it harder for the user to be confident they’re at the right place and some may give up rather than trying to catch the gist.

However I think we do need to be careful not to go to the other extreme. Words and information might be redundant, but they might be necessary context to make a sentence make sense. There’s a real danger in assuming the user is correctly inferring from previous text.

For example, there’s a reason this was in brackets – (saved passwords, cookies, and history) – because they’re examples of the types of data. In the suggested change they become a proper list, which actually has an entirely different meaning.

I think a better way to shorten this information would be to drop the excess off the end:

“It is possible to import settings and other user data (saved passwords, cookies, and history) from Flock into Firefox. This is an advanced operation, however, and it will replace Firefox’s existing data.”

It’s the same message, but clearer and more succinct. ’

It’s also nonsensical.

The part after the last comma seems to be a separate clause, which needs a semi-colon, a dash or a sentence-break before it. And the first part doesn’t actually say anything.

You probably want to say:

“Importing settings, saved passwords, cookies, and history is an advanced operation that will replace existing Firefox data.”