Member-only story
Why I Love Short Form Writing
The verdict is in. We love quotes, we love long-form writing, we love quotes sprinkled throughout long-form writing, and everything in between is trash. Got an idea you want to share in a couple of hundred words? Add eight-hundred more or gut it until it’s short enough to be crammed into a tweet. It’s clearly not pithy or in-depth enough to be worth our time as it is.
I strongly suspect that this mentality is behind the rise of the listicle. On the average top-five list, there will be two items, if you’re lucky, that are worth the pixels they’re darkening. The rest is just filler so that a couple of good ideas can masquerade as a longer article.
But sometimes you only have one idea to share. And it’s a good one. It deserves better than to be lumped in with a bunch of substandard ramblings, for the sake of an arbitrary word count. Good ideas should be treated with respect, distilled into a concentrated tincture of wisdom for the discerning reader. Either that or listicle writers should be required by law to put the bit that’s worth reading at the very top.
