Small edible chunks
February 6th, 2007I write long posts. When I want to make a difficult point, I often need to walk the reader down a long path. Sometimes, the proof could be written with fewer words, but it would be inedible dehydrated logic. Naked skeletons of ideas are more appealing if I can put some flesh around them.
Yet long posts take a long time to read, and this can deter readers. I resent this, but I am myself the perfect example: I seldom have more than half an hour before me when I want to keep up with blogs I like, and I systematically put aside posts I think will take me too much time to read. Either because they are too long (and I admit to saving litlove’s 1000+-word posts for later reading every so often) or because they require too much concentration (and I confess that a week often passes by before I catch up with David’s 299-word novels, so dense are they with meaning, people, and ellipsis).
On Philosophy is a blog I like a lot, where Peter writes short philosophy essays that get people thinking. And I find I am constantly late keeping up with what he writes, because these are often long posts which require a lot of concentration — I seldom have sufficient receptiveness and I do not want to skim through them, because I’d miss the meaning.
And then I realize Peter’s posts are close cousins to mandarine’s big posts. If I cannot keep up with his posts, why should I expect readers to keep up with mine? I am quite sure many of my readers do not have more than five minutes when they pop by, and when they see that they need to scroll down three pages to the end of my post (the narrow column format does not help in this respect, even if it enhances readability), they check a mental box to come back later and then leave (at least, that’s what I do). Gradually the mental check box fades and the post slides down the frontpage into bloglivion.
So here is my tenth gloal for 2007: write shorter posts. No more than 500 words or thereabouts (approximately one page in a paperback novel, one minute reading time). I will not abandon difficult topics, but I will chop long posts into edible little chunks, and people can read bite by bite like smaller chocolates, instead of stowing away the whole bar because it’s too many calories at once.
You know I feel the same way about my own writing, that some times it is just too long. But I also worry that if I condense things it will become more confusing. Perhaps I should write abstracts that spell out the argument in condensed form and then let people decide if they want the full details? Of course that would take more work … What do you think?
Abstracts are definitely the right thing to do for technical stuff. When it is more literary, it sort of gives away any surprise effect — in my humble opinion. It reminds be of chapter subtitles in Jules Verne novels (’In which the hero makes a narrow escape thanks to a shrewd move involving a bit of string’ or something like that). A first paragraph roughly stating where one is going is welcome, though.
oohh that’s a good rule. I do try every time to be less verbose, but somewhere around 750 words I get carried away.
litlove, please do not change a single thing.
I don’t want you to stop the long posts. I like a post that lasts as long as it takes me to drink a cup of coffee and you and Litlove both fit that description. I really appreciate it when someone has something concrete to say and says it well. Go forth and be wordy!
I had not thought of the cup of coffee (I drink tea, and it takes half an hour to drink my mug, hence the half-hour of blog-reading).
Maybe I will keep the odd long post; or I will glue the bits together back into a single post when I publish the last part; or you will have to click ‘next page’ a couple of times. I do not exactly know how I will work this out, but I will consider your cup of coffee as a hard specification.
Meanwhile, you can still find lengthy posts at absidea, unless technical delirium is not your cup of tea.
Well, here we all are with our coffee or tea. I need both as we all do. A shot of espresso while I brew the big pot. A little mandarine, dose of Peterpost, long draught of litlove, bookmark the rest. I don’t recommend word counts for anyone. They change the way you see the world.
I vote for lots of shorter posts (you’re right. I have to save longer posts for when I have a little more time, since I tend to read blogs during ten-minute breaks after working intensely on something for an hour or so) and occasional long posts. I’d hate to see your long, thought-provoking posts disappear altogether. Meanwhile, I always meant to keep my posts short, but they seem to be getting longer and longer.
Oh yes, and it seems from this post, you’re doing a much better job with my 2007 goal of linking to other cool blogs than I’ve been doing thus far.
David: I thought you’d be the last person to advise against word counts. I do not think splitting an article into one-page chunks is quite the same as writing novels with only 299 words.
Emily: do not worry about the disappearance of the long posts. All I mean to do is to serialize them (and publish piecewise, one each day). But I still do not know how I can put things back together in the right order once it’s all published, as the reverse-chronological order makes for difficult reading.
this post really hits home with me - I write long posts and yet find myself putting aside longer posts by others due to time contraints. I will try and write some shorter posts myself!
This is one of the things that troubles me about blogging — the way blogs drive people toward shorter posts. I agree that it’s harder to read a long post on screen, but I don’t like the idea that the internet is inhospitable to longer work. So I guess your solution of serializing makes sense — you can keep some sustained thought going without fatiguing people.
Courtney: this is exactly how I feel. But I also know that some concepts simply cannot be conveyed with fewer than so many words. See my take on readability tests.
Dorothy: I have just had the most pleasant idea: when I serialize long intricate thought processes, I can recall previous episodes in a short summary, just like TV series. That way, people can climb aboard mid-series, and Mr. Forgetful does not need to navigate to the previous chunks to remember what this is all about. Put together, all the little summaries would be a fine abstract to a reunited offline-reading version of the post.