A few people I know seem to complain a lot about making journal entries that aren’t well thought-out. I won’t even start on the obvious explanation to these folk about how setting a baseline “intelligence” is completely hypocritical. But I will explain something that I’ve noticed… I’ve said it before, and really, this works.
\nI barely ever post long entries anymore. Check back a few years ago in this journal and you’ll see really long stuff. Stuff that I actually thought about writing before I went to update.bml. Stuff sorta like this! But get this – even though I’ve had around the same readership for quite a long time, most people have only commented on my short, concise entries. Additionally, I find that I, along with most people, tend to skip over long paragraphs. Even though they might be the meatiest, most important parts of an entry, the sheer mass is too much for casual LJ readers to handle. If I wasn’t trying to make a point, I’d probably already be splitting this paragraph into about 5 smaller ones.
\nI was basically testing my friends and other readers last year by gradually decreasing the size and content of my individual entries. The slightly growing readership was nothing compared to the much bigger amount of comments that I got when I posted something short and sweet, compared to my big expos\u00e9s on whatever.
\nWhat I’m basically pointing out is that those who aim to “raise” intelligence or intellect or whatever the hell you want to call other people’s brains while browsing the Internet are going about it the wrong way.
\nSure, go and restrict yourself to writing nothing less than a thousand-word entry. Pretend you’re a columnist. That’s fine! But don’t freaking think that those who are short and sweet (and therefore get more feedback, more following conversation, and much more social attention) are dumb.
\nIf you have something smart to say, odds are you don’t have to back it up with loads and loads of crap to convince people how right you are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few people I know seem to complain a lot about making journal entries that aren’t well thought-out. I won’t even start on the obvious explanation to these folk about how setting a baseline “intelligence” is completely hypocritical. But I will explain something that I’ve noticed… I’ve said it before, and really, this works. I… Continue reading Brevity!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffreyatw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffreyatw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffreyatw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreyatw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreyatw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreyatw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffreyatw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreyatw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreyatw.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}