Make Me Think about Length
The source for this challenge is the web dictum, “Cut Paper Based Text by 50%.” Easy to say. Easy to remember. Hard to do— and so worth trying to see what happens, to see what else can be done with web text. Web text doesn’t need to be confined to a page, for instance. Web text can use lists, heads and subs, images, links. But the dictum also suggests that the extended, amplified text is little valued, that what’s really important here is the reader’s time reading.
There’s nothing new in the dictum. It goes back to favoring the Plain Style over the Attic. It also speaks of distrust of eloquence, of a preference for Plain Speaking—aligning plain speaking with authenticity and honesty. If you can’t say it in 140 characters, it’s obviously bogus.
Wrong. Persuasion doesn’t rely on length. Brevity isn’t honesty. Or accuracy. Or authority. And there’s more to being brief than length.
Concerns of understanding, comprehension, memorability are set aside when it comes to considerations of length, while the reader becomes a voracious, all-consuming pubic. The writer is to pre-digest content for the reader then prepare it for efficient, fast consumption. Bite-sized packets, readily stuffed into the maw and swallowed whole. Or, like parent bird feeding baby bird, brought to the demanding and needy reader as nourishment. Or …
Well, the challenge opens up more ways of seeing this.
The Challenge
Write a folk tale with a moral, in which you make readers think about reading length of text on the web. No less than 3 minutes reading time.
Folk tales: Think Chicken Little, for instance. Or the commercially constructed tales of Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox. A set of tales is listed at American Folkfore. Some tales are cumulative tales. Folk tales slide into fairy tales and tall tales. Even Rip Van Winkle is characteristic of a folk tale. There are plenty of models out there to work from, imitate, vary. We’re not too concerned about pedigree for this challenge. But whatever tack you take, your tale should have a stated moral at the end.
Comment
The project looks at first glance like a challenge for creative writing. It isn’t. These are works of critical analysis, and can be read with this criteria in mind: What does this story and its moral tell us about reading on the web?
As the folk tales suggest in their various approaches, the idea of the length of the text readily spills into attention, attention economy, considerations of how readers and writers value reading time, of how we characterize readers and writers on the web …
