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To brag a little, my favorite feedback on the newsletters I send is "Thanks! Short and sweet, loved it!" to a 1000 word email. It's okay to write long. But it
by Swizec 5y ago
To brag a little, my favorite feedback on the newsletters I send is "Thanks! Short and sweet, loved it!" to a 1000 word email.
It's okay to write long. But it needs to feel short by being concise.
You can always tell when someone squeezes a 1000 page book into 200 pages. It feels short and insightful. But when they expand a 20 page book into 200 pages, it feels like fluff. You can tell when that happens too.
A good pattern to observe is an author's first and second best seller.
The first is often amazing. A decade of lessons and insights squeezed into a book. The fast followup is usually fluff. 2 years of add-ons expanded into a full book.
- tombert 5y agoYep yep, I totally agree with that. Obviously there are subjects where it would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to express in a short format, and obviously if it requires it, then take the amount of space that you need. I think the goal should be "aim for brevity, but be clear." One of my favorite examples of this are Ron Pressler's "TLA+ in Practice and Theory" posts. It's four extremely long blog posts, but it contains what feels like multiple textbooks' worth of information in there. By comparison to how long it could be, I think it's incredible how concise it is. [1] https://pron.github.io/tlaplus https://pron.github.io/tlaplus
- KittenInABox 5y ago> You can always tell when someone squeezes a 1000 page book into 200 pages. It feels short and insightful. I disagree with this argument. You can most certainly tell when someone is trying to squeeze too much into a too small of a space. The sentences are dense and the information density prohibits actually gleaning anything.
- Swizec 5y agoYou are right there are limits where too much summarizing drops important details. Generally though I prefer writing where the author had to aggressively kill the unimportant because they ran out of space to the writing that fluffs up to fill more space than it needs.
- dilap 5y agoI think this part of the reason why long tweet threads are so popular. It encourages a writing style that makes things feel concise.
- skrtskrt 5y agoTwitter threads that are an expert deep dive into some historical event/story, a law, a court case, a mathematical theory, etc are some of my favorite kinds of writing to read. Each tweet in the thread is often accompanied by a link and/or screen shot of a refernce article or book so I can dive into more source material if I wish... just perfect
- reidjs 5y agoYes! Long writing versus short writing has nothing to do with the absolute number of words used. It has more to do with context and topic. Comprehensive analysis of World War 2? Tens of thousands of words would be too short. Explaining to a friend why you didn't like the movie you just watched? Keep it under a paragraph.