I've occasionally had the experience of wanting to convey a concept from the Sequences to somebody who hasn't read them, but when I try to find a good post to link them to, I realize that the description of the concept is spread out over three or more posts that each individually have a frustratingly low content-to-words ratio. (The LW wiki helps a bit, but there the descriptions are often too concise to be useful.)
I suspect that the popularity of the Sequences is both despite and due to the writing style. This problem with the style didn't matter so much when the posts were being written and they showed up once a day in my RSS feed - in order to properly learn a concept, you need to encounter it several times with slight variations, and the actual message being spread out over many posts was originally helpful in this respect. It spread out the message over several days of reading and thus helped learn it better than if there had been just one clear, to-the-point post - that you read once and then forgot.
However, now that nobody is reading the posts at a one-per-day rate anymore, the style and format seems harmful. When you're reading through a (huge) archived sequence of posts, unnecessary fluff will just create a feeling of things having being written in a needlessly wordy way. And it makes it very hard to usefully link to posts about specific concepts.
Are there some specific concepts that come readily to mind? Maybe we could experiment with making much more substantial, useful wiki pages, riddled with quotations / excerpts from LW and elsewhere. The current standard size and tone of the wiki pages could be preserved -- as the lead sections for much longer articles.
(Broadly) wikipedian style is also useful for keeping articles organized and concise because of the section structure. Sections make topic divisions obvious, and 'See more' links can be included at the beginning of each section for more detail...
For a long time, Eliezer has been telling me I should write more like he does. I've mostly resisted, preferring instead to write like this:
At the recent Effective Altruism Summit I tried to figure out which personal features predicted writing style preference.
One hypothesis was that people who read lots of fiction (like Eliezer) will tend to prefer Eliezer's story-like style, while those who read almost exclusively non-fiction (like me) will tend to prefer my "just gimme the facts" style. This hypothesis didn't hold up well on my non-scientific survey of ~10 LW-reading effective altruists.
Another hypothesis was that most people would prefer Eliezer's more exciting posts, while people trained in the sciences or analytic philosophy (which insist on clear organization, definitions, references to related work, etc.) would prefer my posts. This hypothesis fared a bit better, but not by much.
Another hypothesis was that people who had acquired an epiphany addiction would prefer Eliezer's style, whereas those who just want to learn everything efficiently would prefer my style. But I didn't test this.
Another hypothesis that occurs to me is that people with short attention spans could prefer my more skimmable style. But I haven't tested this.
Perhaps the community would like to propose some hypotheses, and test them with LW polling?