The problem is that long doesn’t mean good — it just doesn’t look like most of the junk. – Marco Arment
Jonathan Mahler in the New York Times, James Bennet in The Atlantic and Marco on his blog are bringing up issues that I I first wrote about last summer. As a good editor once taught me — if you can say it in a 1000 words, you can say it smarter, better in 500 words. And save your readers some time in the process.
An ongoing dilemma, longform or short form and which is better, it depends on the data? If an approach similar to Data Journalism or Digital Humanities can be used, can even less words be used, because the user can with a little help deduce even more value from the information conveyed. A big dilemma for historians as well as businessmen, How much data is just too much…
Great piece of advice! I tend to have the tendency of ‘if you can say it in 500 words, why not use 1000!’ – so this is something I should try to work on! 🙂
It is way harder to write short than long. Short is good.
Reblogged this on Dumadia's Blog.
Mark Twain: “Sorry I wrote you such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one.”