August 17, 2015

Tie Me To The Length Of That Serioulsy Short Leash

I've discovered, during the course of writing my Tumblr blog (note, it sucks up a ton 'o bandwidth, so think long and hard before going there. just sayin') for the past five months or so, that I have two very distinct blogging styles.

Here, I is somewhat long (1/2 to 2 pages in length), while over there, I is painfully short (roughly 3 paragraphs in length). I suppose part of the reason is that it's a recap blog, thus it only needs a few short paragraphs. Sort of like what you see here at the moment. Another part of the reason is that Tumblr is geared more towards pictures/gifs/videos than it is text. Text is almost an afterthought there, whereas here, pics are more of an afterthought than text.

Ya know, I always wasn't this verbose on my Blogger blogs. For those of you who can recall (and that's about all the fingers on one hand), way early on, I used to write short blog posts. I also used to post on a punishing schedule too, but that's another story for not another time. Somewhere along the way, I got away from the short posts and my posts gradually morphed into the type where you will see at least two or three times a month, a jump break inserted into said post.

The only legitimate reasons that I can come up with as to why the excess verbiage are basically this:

1} Real world has bled into my blog world;
2} Chat rooms of yesteryear has also bled into my blog world.

Second point first. As most of you know, I trolled the chat rooms for roughly 4 year. One of the many, many things that bugged me (and there were a lot), was the 1500 character limit for posting. It has always been a problem of mine writing stuff that can smartly sum up a point in under a half page (which is why I stay away from writing short-short fiction), so it seriously chaffed my inner thighs to be under an arbitrary word limit. So when I decided to move to the blog world, out went the word cap.

First point second. As most of you know, I work for the state of Connecticut and have been since 1996. And as anyone who has ever dealt with the guv'ment on any kind of level, you know that any documentation that you receive during your encounter is basically information overload with a three page minimum. This is directly due to the fact that no one, repeat, no one wants to crucified over a minute slipup that an unscrupulous person (public or private sector) would take advantage of.

Because of this very real outcome (personal experience here), I have a tendency to do ginormous info dumps that the average person would only see in a badly written novel in my internal business correspondence. External only requires that you provide short succinct answers to any question posed in an e-mail, and no tangent straying. Ever.

So because of those two points, I have issues when it comes to writing blog posts. Such as this one, which probably meets the low end of my estimated length (to verify, do a print preview of just this post and nothing else). I'm working on it, but it will always be a perpetual uphill battle.

A question for you: Does any of what you do in the real world for non-story writing bleed into what you write for blog posts?

(c) 2015 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved.

15 comments:

  1. One can say pithy things, or well researched and thought out things. It's pretty hard to do both.

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    1. Pretty much. Although I do give it the old college try from time to time.

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  2. If it does, then I hashtag it Fun at Work. Hmmm - doesn't seem as if that happens much. :)

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    1. I wish I could hashtag some of my work as fun. Certainly would make things interesting.

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  3. I don't do a lot of writing at my job, but it's always short. Maybe a sentence or two or some code. Guess that reflects in my short blog posts. (Which end up being long because I cram so many images into them.)

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    1. It seems whenever I try to write something short at work, it immediately boomerangs. It's like people have comprehension issues with a sentence less than 10 words. Go figure.

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  4. For years, I not only kept my real world out of my blog, no one knew what I look like or what my name was. I didn't do the chatroom thing a while lot back in the day (2005-2008), but my blog has continued to evolve these last 10 years. My posts used to be super long, but with the advent of microblogging (Twitter and Tumblr), I have worked to keep my posts shorter these days.

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    1. In one particular aspect, no one really knows what I look like. That is, unless they search out the one post that has my actual face contained within. When I'd first started my blog back in '08, I used to write a lot about my job, simply because it was excellent cannon fodder for the blog. Nowadays, I only mention my job in passing.

      Shorter is usually good, and that is a goal I'm looking at for the rest of this year (I hope).

      Thanks for stopping by to comment.

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  5. HAHAHAHAHAHA
    In a word, yes. It provides a lot of material!

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    1. Sadly, job is providing a treasure trove of material, and all of it confidential.

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  6. Recently I've made my blog posts much shorter. I just feel my readers haven't got the time to wade through lines of text in the way they may have done in the past. I think there are so many other online distractions nowadays that unless you write something stunning, readers see the massive body of text and either skim read it or just don't bother at all.

    I don't really write about my job on my blog, I'm not sure it would interest my readers really.

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    1. Got some excellent points there. Most of the other blogs I follow (including yours) have pretty much mastered the art of the short post. Very rarely do I come across a long post, and when I do, I skim the first couple to see if it grabs my interest, then continue on if it does.

      I'm always curious about what people do for a job in life, but I can also understand about wanting to keep some aspects of one's life hidden from view.

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    2. Joey, for the record, I always read your whole post. No skimming. :-)

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    3. My workplace writing is boring, so I need to do some blog reading before I start my blog writing. I just have to get back into that rhythm and style, like warming up before a dance class.

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    4. I wish mine was boring. But, when you work it the public sector, it's anything but.

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These days, the written word is to die for, so please leave a comment that shows me and everyone else the real you. All kinds of verbiage will be cheerfully accepted in the spirit it was written.