Information Entropy and Fact Density
The proportion of a passage made up of hard facts, specific numbers, named entities, and causal reasoning, once the adjectives are wrung out.
Analogy Mental model
The ratio of actual beef to broth. Thin content is a bowl of dishwater with two coriander leaves floating in it; dense content is a jar of concentrated sauce where every spoonful is solid.
In practice What you actually do
Retrieval systems split pages into passages and match them against questions, and passages carrying several concrete numbers, units, models, or named entities per hundred words match far more reliably. Write sentences that pack specification into them rather than sentences that describe the impression a specification gives.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Apply the wringing test at the end of drafting: delete the paragraph and ask whether the reader lost any facts. If nothing is lost, the paragraph was decoration, and decoration dilutes the passages that would otherwise be retrieved.
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