My approach to blogging.
You may or may not have noticed that I keep things short here. That’s because I learned quite a while ago that length isn’t such a great thing when it comes to blogging. It’s been established that people don’t read past the first fifty words of an email, and while the envelope is likely a bit larger for a blog entry, I doubt it’s much more than that.
My entries are always in the neighborhood of two hundred and fifty words because I know your time is valuable. I respect that you don’t have the luxury of settling in for a thousand-word essay. We lead busy lives.
Humorously enough, I learned my lesson when I was harassed by the alt-right followers of a particularly objectionable author. I’d written an extensive breakdown of why making fun of people with disabilities is a bad thing—which ought to be a given, but there you go—and received numerous complaints that I took too long to make my point. This made me wonder. Was I being too wordy? The short answer is yes.
Sure, these mouth-breathers don’t have the attention span of gnats, but that’s beside the point. You learn from writing professionally that if one person vocally criticizes something about your work, a lot more people feel the same way but say nothing. It’s up to you whether you take that as an opportunity to learn and grow.