Keep it Short, Stupid (Pic of the Week)
Posted in Pic of the Week, Reading & Writing on Feb 29th, 2008
Those reading “Bernie” will find Part Nine picks up where Part Eight left off. Handy, eh?
Last weekend, Ben plays coming off a week’s battle with the flu.
(click to enlarge)
In this space, I often post long missives whose message might be conveyed in far fewer words. I once read an article that stated the average Internet user has the attention span to read about 500 words. Yikes! That isn’t much space to convey my message. For those of us not doing this for money, making time to write short pieces is tough.
“What? It takes more time to write fewer words?” you might ask.
Yes, indeed. But don’t take it from me. Read the following quotes from two great minds of the past.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal, 1623 - 1662
I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910
Apparently Twain was so terribly short on time that he didn’t have time to come up with an original quote.
In storytelling, there’s obviously a little more wiggle room because it’s often better to describe a place for the reader rather than merely state its name. For letters, e-mails, or essays — particularly for work, wordiness is far from Godliness.
For those with a little more time on their hands, here’s an informative (and mercifully brief) piece geared toward writing concise essays (because, after all, aren’t blog posts like little essays?), but that could prove useful for other applications:
http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html
Hmm.. you bring up good points.
Me, I like to get to the point too much some times. I leave out a lot of the nuances, the details that color the background for people.
I have to learn to write better…..
I love the quotes. Very thoughtful. The shot is Ben is great. I love how his hair is lit up.
I am not a good writer. I haven’t written since college until I started my blog and I am amazed at how much I look forward to putting it together, even if it is just a few words. It is therapuetic for me. Who would have thought?
Have a good Friday Mark!
I’ve read that essay before, but it was sure nice to read it again. Poignant. And that quote of Pascal’s is one of my favourites. (In the proper circumstance, I’m quite a fan of long letters.)
A happy, healthy Ben is good to see, too.
Wonderful to see Ben smiling again.
The essay was insightful. I tend to write far more than I need to (well…when I’m writing that is). I like to ramble about. And that’s fine if I then go back and edit. But I don’t enjoy editing…so I just release my first drafts upon the world. Then I can’t figure out why I’m no good at editing when I want to do it for something like a fiction story.
The essay is interesting for a statistical reason: a 380 word sentence! I’m not sure how that fits into instructions for good writing. By the end of the sentence, I had forgotten where we were going. Maybe my attention span is even shorter than 500 words!
Trivia Time:
James Joyce, for a number of decades, held the record for longest sentence ever when one sentence in Ulysses came in at about 8,500 words.
That was broken when another sentence came along (I forget the author and the name of the book - please just trust me) that was over 13,000 words. Thirteen Thousand!
Strunk and White would NOT approve.
Brevity has never been my thing.
Glad to see Ben playing again, and I love that shirt he’s wearing! Where’d you get that one?
I never got around to commenting on anybody’s comments. Oops.
Dave - Nuances are good. Just avoiding the old “we did this, and then we did this. Then we did that, and oh, then we did that,” is hard sometimes, because real life (Regular Life, if you will) gets in the way.
Anna - Maybe you were born to say it with pictures, and I was cursed with the desire to do both, but blessed with neither the talent nor the time!
Simon - You know as well as anybody how hard it is to see the wee one(s) sick.
Moksha - But when your rambling is peppered with humor and insight, it’s not a bad thing.
Now, if someone would just pass you the pepper (oooh, burn!).
Pops - Besides you, I would expect only Simon to throw out statistics regarding that essay. Except, he would have done it with graphs (hey! I used “would have” correctly that time).
Simon - And, you proved my point to Pops.
Jay - See comment to Moksha (but without the joke about pepper — your writing’s plenty spicy)
Charles - I can’t remember where we got that shirt. It’s made to look like he’s wearing a black long-sleeve tee under a short-sleeve tee, when in fact the black sleeves are sewn into the shirt. He’s wearing only one layer. It’s Starter, so I’m sure you could find it.