I’m noticing I have a tendency to overwrite. I was working on a guest post and realized it when I inflated an 800 word story to a 1600 words. When i sat down to edit it, I realized all the crap I put into it that wasn’t necessary or essential to the story.
On the other end of the spectrum, I have this weird pressure that I need to come up with something amazing & insightful that’s lengthy and impressive and somewhere between 800 & 1200 words. Sometimes I have random topics/events/issues that come into my head and I want to put down on paper, but I don’t have enough to flesh them out to what I consider “full-fledged” blog posts so I sit around and do nothing with them instead of letting them be what they are.
I started writing this post the other day. This morning I woke up and opened my Google Reader & read this post from Seth Godin. His ending quote particularly struck me:
Just because you can write more doesn’t mean you should.
Kick me in the face!
Your time & readership is important & I really do want to honor that. Writing & communicating effectively is more important than producing a lot of words on a page/screen/monitor. Just because I can write a lot of words, doesn’t mean it’s automatically valuable. Just because I can write more, doesn’t mean I should. I’ll keep it short & sweet. Promise.
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Joel,
You should have stopped this post after the first paragraph.
Just kidding. 😉
You hit the nail on the head. I think that I tend to feel that my blog posts should be at least a certain length. But at the same time, I wonder how many people read the entire post when I write a long post. There is so much out there that I know that I end up just scanning through very quickly and moving to the next item.
I did read your Short & Sweet post though, so maybe you are onto something. 🙂
Haha =) Touche.
Thanks for chiming in. I seem to have that urge a lot, but then I see an awesome post like the one Jonathan Fields [http://www.jonathanfields.com/blog/daybreak/] put up today, that reminds me that you don’t necessarily have to use a lot of words to say a lot.
This post reminds me of a quote:
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” – Mark Twain
I often get too wordy as well. I’m not sure if I don’t want to spend the time to make it short, but I think the better writer you are (like Seth Godin), the fewer words you have to use to get your point across. I may have to write 300 words to express a thought that Seth can get across in a sentence or two.
Seth Godin is the master of great short posts and I try to emulate him often.