“the concision that’s become their expectation.” Love this line. It’s true. So much of today’s writing, especially online, must be broken up into bite-size chunks. Short paragraphs. I hired a copy writer to coach me about online writing a few years ago. “People scan online. They’re impatient. You can’t indulge yourself with long ass paragraphs and flowery stuff,” he said. It made me sad. No one online today would stand for the great Russian novelists and their depth of description. Get to the point, Tolstoy! The readers would promptly flee to cat videos on TikTok. Although I admit that reading works from past eras slows me down, particularly when references escape me. For example, I had no idea who Mrs.Southcot or the Cock-lane ghost were in the opening pages of Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities.” So I suppose in a hundred years written references to today’s cultural moments and notable people will be equally foreign, but then the AI bots will probably translate everything.
What's notable to me about this advice—“People scan online. They’re impatient. You can’t indulge yourself with long ass paragraphs and flowery stuff”—is that it's assumed to be true without any real justification. It might in fact be true for most readers, but someone could just as easily then make a commercial argument that longer, flowery paragraphs are the best way to reach an unreachable audience—because so few people write that way online. Completely forgetting any artistic impulse, I wouldn't want to compete against the countless writers striving to reach short attention spans. This seems like a difficult game and one that's quite crowded. I would add that this copy writer also revealed an assumption with the word 'indulge'. A single sentence could fit the description of being indulgent if it's gratuitous, while a lengthy paragraph could feel, sentence by sentence, as absolutely necessary. Thank you for the thoughtful comment, John.
“the concision that’s become their expectation.” Love this line. It’s true. So much of today’s writing, especially online, must be broken up into bite-size chunks. Short paragraphs. I hired a copy writer to coach me about online writing a few years ago. “People scan online. They’re impatient. You can’t indulge yourself with long ass paragraphs and flowery stuff,” he said. It made me sad. No one online today would stand for the great Russian novelists and their depth of description. Get to the point, Tolstoy! The readers would promptly flee to cat videos on TikTok. Although I admit that reading works from past eras slows me down, particularly when references escape me. For example, I had no idea who Mrs.Southcot or the Cock-lane ghost were in the opening pages of Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities.” So I suppose in a hundred years written references to today’s cultural moments and notable people will be equally foreign, but then the AI bots will probably translate everything.
What's notable to me about this advice—“People scan online. They’re impatient. You can’t indulge yourself with long ass paragraphs and flowery stuff”—is that it's assumed to be true without any real justification. It might in fact be true for most readers, but someone could just as easily then make a commercial argument that longer, flowery paragraphs are the best way to reach an unreachable audience—because so few people write that way online. Completely forgetting any artistic impulse, I wouldn't want to compete against the countless writers striving to reach short attention spans. This seems like a difficult game and one that's quite crowded. I would add that this copy writer also revealed an assumption with the word 'indulge'. A single sentence could fit the description of being indulgent if it's gratuitous, while a lengthy paragraph could feel, sentence by sentence, as absolutely necessary. Thank you for the thoughtful comment, John.