Ten Minutes To Write, Two To Read

Wise writers know when to cut out the fat.

The great thing about shorter posts is that you don’t have to devote a lot of time to read them. The longer ones might go unnoticed because, well, too long. Bigger isn’t better in every case.

Likewise, TLDR is not a prescription for anything. It’s not some medical professional’s initials (not in common use anyway). And it’s not a secret code. It simply means: Too Long, Didn’t Read.

If you find an excessively wordy article out there and you feel obliged to read it, but it simply doesn’t capture your interest, then you might tag it with the TLDR.

There’s another, older acronym which means the same thing, only in a different tone, and that is this: KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Professional writers often have a structure within their writing which allows you to “skip to the end” and get the larger idea through a summary. When a summary is available, a wise writer will also include a foreword of sorts to summarize, in case they have readers who don’t want to skim-read the entire article yet still glean something from it.

In case a person has the reading style of “skim ’til you find something juicy,” some writers will employ the Easter Egg Method.

Photo by ROMAN ODINTSOV on Pexels.com

They know their work is too long for anyone except the most devoted students, so they’ll leave a treat somewhere, or multiple treats at varying intervals, in the work.

Amateurs, of course, will do none of the above. Amateurs wax long on words and wane on quality, leaving no treats at the two ends or anywhere in the middle.

So, before this article gets too long for even my short attention span, I’ll end with this nugget: Wisdom is not to make things seem complex, but to make the complex seem simple.

Published by Kurt Gailey

This is where I'm supposed to brag about how I've written seven novels, twelve screenplays, thousands of short stories, four self-help books, and one children's early-reader, but I'd rather stay humble. You can find out about things I've written or follow my barchive (web archive, aka 'blog) at xenosthesia.com or follow me on twitter @kurt_gailey. I love sports and music and books, so if you're an athlete or in a band or you're a writer, give me a follow and I'll most likely follow you back. I've even been known to promote other people's projects.

Leave a comment

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: