The value of short form

Written by Jim Chaput

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After a 19-year career in financial services, Jim left a leadership position to focus on health and fitness. Jim is a Master Practitioner of Applied Movement Neurology and holds Certificates in Applied Functional Science and 3DMAPS from the Gray Institute. His passion is empowering people to help resolve the pain, tension and insomnia that prevents them from living well.

One of the early decisions I made about this blog is to keep the posts relatively short. In a world where people receive too many emails, people might actually read short, punchy blog posts instead of saving them for later. As much as I write for myself, making an impact on others depends on them actually reading my posts.

I see lots of other people doing long form posts on social media. Often each sentence is its own paragraph which suggests that these people did the same marketing training. I suppose it’s better than the other extreme of one, humongous paragraph.

On several occasions, I’ve seen people comment on the lead lines of a long social media post only to have the author respond that they missed the point. The point was towards the end and the person didn’t get that far. It makes me wonder whether these long posts are fit for purpose, need to be written differently or are for a different audience.

How often do you save long articles for later and never take the time to read them? What inspires you to read to the end?

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2 Comments

Georgina on July 4, 2020 at 1:14 am

Hey Jim! I think both long and short form have a place. Your short form blogs are great because I can literally pause what I’m doing and read them. It was a bit harder to find where to leave a comment though ;).
Really agree that scrolling through Facebook there are lots of really long posts that I just scroll past but the ones I care about I will read, I already have to be bought in though. It was suggested to me that there’s no such thing as too long only too boring and that lots of headers and shirt sentences help to keep attention. Depends on the situation I guess.
- Jim Chaput on July 4, 2020 at 9:42 am
  
  I agree that there is no right or wrong way to write. I do read some long form articles and essays. Sometimes when I cannot bring myself to read a long one, I assume I am not the target audience.
  
  I love short sentences and write as concisely as I can. Every sentence as a paragraph does not work for me though. So many people seem to do it now that it seems contrived. I could be wrong – maybe so many people do it now because it works.