207 Characters, That’s All

No sentence need ever be longer

Rob Muhlestein
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

I’m a little obsessive. There I said it.

Lately I have really been obsessing over the length of a CAVA Message, or really any message for that matter.

Related to this is the length of a sentence.

Why the obsession? Because thinking of knowledge content in terms of how it would be spoken matters more now than ever before.

For example, some Speech2Text platforms automatically break up utterances into 100 characters tops. These will usually stop on an end-of-sentence punctuation character or a comma. I noticed that the web implementation of SpeechSynthesis does not state this limitation and have successfully used it to process utterances of up to 207 characters.

But here’s the thing.

After 207 characters most mobile screens run out of room. If we accept mobile-first along with the voice-first and offline-first principles we should limit messages to this length.

By association this limits all sentences to 207 characters as well.

At this point in the thought process I began questioning any sentence, in any context. Does it really ever need to be longer than 207 characters? Many of my language arts instructors would say no. Hemingway would disagree.

But do you know who would totally agree?

Most modern instructional designers agree that less is more, that forcing your sentences to their absolute minimum is best for digestion. After rewriting some of my content into CAVAML I have to agree. In fact, the act of rewriting content for voice has made me a phenomenally better writer, at least by most instructional designer standards.

Think about it. The sentence of that last paragraph was exactly 140 characters. Ring any bells? Yep, Twitter used to limit all messages to 140 and has increased to 280.

Even if Twitter thinks messages can be 280 characters that does not mean we should use every character in a single sentence (unless you are our current president/dictator).

Speaking of dictators…

I officially declare that no sentence should ever be longer than 207 characters.

By the way, a sentence with 207 characters, including emojis, actually requires four times that in bytes (since we have to assume an entire sentence of Unicode characters, the biggest of which take 4 bytes).

In case you were wondering, that last paragraph, in its entirety, was exactly 207 characters. As you can see, that’s plenty. If we are to quiesce to Medium’s imposed standards (which I love) that means no sentence should ever exceed three lines in a Medium blog post. 😁

Did you know that emojis can be vocalized as well by SpeechSynthesis? Well they can, you definitely have to try 💩 to placate your inner 8-year-old.

In conclusion, I’ve decided to add this 207 character length imposition into the KnowledgeNet BaseML standard as well so that CAVAML can simply be a subset of BaseML as we prepare them for submission to the IETF and other standards bodies. This should bring the (dynamic) CAVA and (static) KnowledgeNet and SOIL initiatives in sync. In other words, a SOIL module is just a light-weight KnowledgeNet KnowledgeBase that can be converted to inline CAVAML for conversion to other renderers and vocalizer platforms.

Oh, and I will be eventually creating a VSCode extension to help flag sentences longer than 207 characters.

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