Abstract

We live in a world of the 'sound bite', the 'summary' and the 'abridged version'. Film distributors force directors to release films cut back to a certain time length, television series split into short programmes of 50 minutes maximum and books are now being published as 'short books' cut back to 20,000 words. Even the BDJ now provides 'In Brief' boxes and summary pages for all the articles and the research papers in an attempt to provide the essence of each paper in a shortened easy-to-read format to enable people to save time.