In Writing, Less Is Often More.
Posted: Thursday, April 09, 2009
by Mike Fak
http://mikefak.com
Well I am getting a whole new pile of e-mails I really don't need to see.
I imagine the Lincoln Daily News has made it to some new mailing lists that people pay good money to in order to find instant rejection.
A lot of them are company press releases that don't even come close to being newsworthy.
I wonder if anyone in the news business anywhere ever uses any of those.
I'm also getting a ton of submissions from hopeful pundits and analysts that really must have never read a paper.
The articles are 3 or 4 thousand words long and have all kinds of: "go to YouTube" or FaceBook or some other place to see what they mean. A writer should never say go to another source in something they write. A paper, online or in print, doesn't care to give their competitors an opportunity to gain readership via something they publish: so they won't. Could you imagine a Washington Post article saying go to the New York Times for further details?
I recently received a bit of righteous punditry from a person that was an amazing 5200 words. Now I wonder where that person ever saw a column that filled an entire sheet of print or ten pages in a web site. It seems that thanks to the web, writers aren't noticing when their writing is far too long.
Dating myself, the old rule of thumb in the op/ed section was to be a two-minute-read. Since a person reads somewhere between 250 to 400 words a minute that is a good rule of thumb for an article. In other words, 500 to 800 word articles have the best chance of being fully read.
When something drives well past 1000 words, chances are you lose the reader unless the subject is very interesting to them.
If you look at a newspaper you can see that this rule of thumb applies to all but the most controversial or important news items of a day. Often in those cases, you see breaks in the story. In online editions you see bold sub-headlines in the text. This is to break the longevity of a read and turn those longer stories into several mini-stories all about the same bit of news.
I am sure all of you have started to read articles and then have just given up or clicked away or turned the page. The point is a writer has just so much time to engage and hold a reader's interest. A recent Nielsen online report showed on average an internet reader stays on a story for 52 seconds. That is a harsh statistic but it can be tempered with the fact many people hit an article, look at the headline and move on. So probably that can be interpreted to mean another article had two minutes spent on it while the other had two seconds and thus the average of one minute.
One of the biggest reasons articles get too long is writers, myself included, become enamored with several sentences or paragraphs that almost say the same thing. These words are like our children and we don't want to cut any of them but we should. Redundancy, no matter how well worded or written is still redundancy.
As I am approaching the 700 word count here today I will leave you with a modest opinion.
I believe right now the best writers that understand the essentialness of getting the news or opinion out and completed quickly is the Associated Press.
By far, the worst I see is the online MSNBC stories that often run four or more pages. I read AP voraciously. I have never finished any of those "click to page 2,3,4,5' MSNBC stories ever.
By the way the word count on this article came in at 746 words and I promise you I lost readers along the way.
This Article has been viewed 2,247 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (8 total)I have tried to keep my article around 600 words. Lately I broke that rule, but will go back to it.Good advice here.Thanks Ken.I worry about word count but I often go past. Sometimes an article demands more words. But often the point can be made quicker.Mike
Hi Mike.I stayed with you. I always do. There is the "known author" factor to consider also. If you have a good readership, you can run to longer articles ... or at least that is my hope! :) I seem to have a hard time keeping them short; especially if it is something I am passionate about.Still, this is good advice to remember while doing the final edit of an article. Unfortunately for me, it have more of a tendency to add rather than subtract.As always, thanks for your thoughts,DianneYep Dianne. A certain writer will keep his or her certain readers but too long and you might not get any new readers either.Always a tough call between idea and word countMike
Mike,I'm sorry, what did you write after you had piles?Jim GriffinI have no piles yet Jim. But when I do the story will be no longer than they are.Mike
Great article. Well done.That is a terribly short article. Ha, ha, haI agree with you... If you try intentionally to write too much it ends up just being a huge waffle.Thanks Connor. Yep sometimes a passion for a topic can get us rambling and then as you say it becomes a mess.Mike
Didn't lose me Mike! Great article. Good information. Thanks!Thanks Brianna.Glad to help when I can.Mike
Thanks once again for a very informative article.Linda DThank you for reading Linda.It is appreciated.Mike
Your advice is much appreciated. Thanks for the free motivational talk. I need it badly. In fact, I just trimmed my current article from over 900 words to 601 words. ~mogama~
Hi MikeThe consencus amongst internet article -writing "experts" is that an article should be between 350-700 words.Thanks for the extra insights you bring to the subject.You are welcome Jonathan.Mike
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