Writing shorter

Among the things that I have learned through the years is that people generally do not want to read long posts.  I am not sure where the ideal word count lies, but it is definitely shorter than how much i used to write while I was in high school newspaper—around 500-600 words in length.  While plenty of people are capable of writing such length of pieces (in fact, much of college papers tend to run much longer than that), I have learned that longer blog posts generally get the “tl,dr;” treatment:  the sheer volume of words that fill the monitor becomes so overwhelming that people skim over the words at best, and at worst, the post is simply scroll down to the end, not a single word read and entire thoughts ignored.

Sure, chances are the post is filled with angst-filled rambles that make little sense, but think of how many quality reading materials people has given up on.  This phenomenon is rather funny, too, as it corresponds with the society that is endowed with ever-shortening attention span.  That explains a lot of the newer applications that have recently gained popularity on the Internet—how about Twitter, or maybe Stumbleupon?

With that in mind, I will try to trim my posts as much as I can.  It will not be all that hard; much of what I have to do is to get rid of excess words.  Maybe Hemingway was on to something with his writing style.