Friday, October 15, 2004

Long or Short?

Blogging is fun! No doubt! And sometimes we can get on a rant and just type until our fingers fall off. Are longer articles better? I am going to suggest yes and no. As a blogger you are really a publisher. If you were publishing a book you would draft and correct and throw things out and re-draft and proof and correct and write again and so forth until you had the perfect piece for publishing. By sharp contrast, we tend to blog with stream-of-consciousness which unfortunately can lead to disconnected thoughts, bad flow and unnecessary words but it can also lead to some near Pulitzer wonders!

I suggest that you use stream-of-consciousness to type your writings into an editor such as Microsoft Word. Then step away and return later to proof read and edit. Next break the writing into multiple parts and publish the first part only. At the end of that publishing put a note "installment 1 of 9 (whatever your number is) - next release tomorrow at 9am" Choose some better words than that. My stream-of-consciousness has failed me for the moment.

Now you have created a writing that people on the go will be able to read completely where as they might skim a longer posting and think "I'll come back to this" only to never view it again. Additionally, you have given the reader a reason to return to your blog for additional reading. In this way they will read the entire lenghty article over the course of several days rather than skimming it on one day and "coming back to it" later.

Note: Be sure to link all of your related posts.

"Coming soon: Contiguous Thoughts and Topics"


Posted by: djuggler | 1:27 PM |