Last week, Too Shy to Stop published “The Sad Nature of Adaptation, or Why the Media Sucks” by Peter Ricci. In Too Shy to Stop history, this article attracted the most comments. Some of the commenters jabbed at the length of Peter’s article: “Waaaaaaaaayyyy too long” and “2,000 words is too long for an online piece”.
Given the medium, I don’t know if his article was too long. However, I was shocked by the commenters need to impose a word limit for online writing. Show me the textbook that says online writing can’t be longer than 2,000 words or bring me to the class where the professor is teaching this rule.
Traditionally, editors held writers to word counts because of the costs associated with print production and space on the printed page. Online, the possibilities regarding length are virtually limitless; few costs are associated with online publishing, and the beauty of an HTML page is that it has few limits.
These comments raised a lot of questions for me; was the article “too long” for these because readers are used to consuming short blog entries online? Was it too long because reading on a computer screen is difficult? Was it too long because the writer exceeded his focus?
When readers continue to be unhappy with the amount of words it takes to probe an idea or story, then we need to examine why they are turned off by the length.
If you ever read The New Yorker, you should know that many of those articles are multiple pages in length. Sometimes, when I start reading an article in this magazine, I peek ahead to see how much I will have to read, and I often groan if the page count exceeds four or five.
Is my attention span problem fueled by the digital age?
Regardless of the answer, digitization makes the writer’s task more difficult. If you want to write for a digital publication, and you absolutely feel the need to write a long piece, then you will have to make sure that each and every word is worth the space on the digital page.
In print, words meant money and cost and space. Online, words mean the reader’s attention; if you make one wrong move, you will lose it.
When writers start contributing to Too Shy to Stop, they often ask me how long the articles should be. I usually give them a minimum (400 words) word count, but I never set a maximum. I will edit the articles heavily and be sure to strip extraneous content, but I want writers to fully explore an idea without the constraints of a word limit.
Too Shy to Stop is an online magazine, NOT a blog. Sure, blog posts are a great way to present little bits of content and share ideas and thoughts. However, the ideas presented in a blog entry are neither fully explored nor realized.
We are not interested in scratching the surface; we are interested in fully covering a story and examining all its aspects.
