SHORT-FORM WRITING

I've been blitz-writing a set of short 200-word articles for a project this week.

I'm amazed how constricting yourself to the short-form really focuses you. Every word matters - there's no room for waffle. That's why I initially preferred Twitter to flippybook - you had to find ingenious ways to express a thing in 140 characters. It was impossible to get bogged down in your own opinion; it forced you to be concise in a way that flimflambook didn't.

The latest data though shows that even since Twitter expanded the limit to 280 characters, only 12% of tweets are actually longer than 140 characters anyway! The short-form is hard-wired into the way we use the application.*

Using less space to do more work fascinates me. I hope it works in other media! With a bit of self-discipline, streamlining of communication and a little persona modelling, I reckon I can get my presentations down to a punchy minimum.

What amazed me was that after a while, all my articles were hitting the word count almost exactly. 204, 208, 190, 196 - leaving the final tweaking as a pleasant word-game.

Gosh, I do like writing.

200 words in this one, by the way. Pretty good.

*https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/twitters-doubling-of-character-count-from-140-to-280-had-little-impact-on-length-of-tweets/