It’s highly likely that the people you are trying to reach with your message — whatever it may be — lead busy working lives and have to deal with constant interruptions and distractions. Your gift to them should therefore be brevity. Try to tell your story, or at least deliver the essential (for your audience) information, in as few words as possible*.
This advice can be usefully applied to everything from editorials, articles and newsletters to conference presentations and event reports. Oh, and blog posts.
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* There is, of course, a time and place for stretching things out. I’m currently working my way through Les Misérables, the English translation of which clocks in at more than 1,200 densely packed pages; and I’m a big fan of ‘longreads‘, such as this one, about Upworthy, that I recommended recently to someone grappling with the challenge of tackling negative perceptions of migrants.
You walk the talk Eoghan, great !
Anyway the attention span nowadays is brief too, and impressing people more than a brief moment is hard.
Less is more, so the less needs to be more meaningful…
I fully agree Frode. Much more could be said about what you actually do with those few words you deliever, whether on screen, in print or orally, but I wanted to keep this post brief, for obvious reasons. (The medium was the message in this case!)
Gillian at Bright Green Learning posted this week about the amount of time that goes into successfully producing even a single TED-like talk. As you say, less is more, but – as Gillian points out – making the less more meaningful takes more time that one might think.