Bloated Emails

Written by on Sep 5 2007

In a recent email I noticed the signature.

Q: Why is this email 5 sentences or less?
A: http://five.sentenc.es

The site goes on to say we should write emails like SMS messages keeping them under 5 sentences, quick and to the point. Should we should keep blog posts under 5 sentences as well?

5 Comments

Robert Fischer
Robert Fischer said on September 06, 2007

I don’t think we necessarily need to keep blog posts down to 5 sentences. Keeping e-mails short makes a lot of sense, because its value is mainly in back-and-forth exchanges. Succinct delivery of specific information (possibly with associated reference documents) is really e-mail’s forte.

Blogs, on the other hand, need to be more fully-formed. They are full ideas in and of themselves, and often contain arguments, background information, and other context. These things are already understood by an e-mail recipient, but aren’t guarantied to be around for random people who stumble into your blog post.

Now, responses should probably be kept short, because there is an existent context (the OP), and because it’s more give-and-take. It’s more like an e-mail in these regards.

And since responses should probably be kept short, I’m going to stop talking now.

Jem
Jem said on September 11, 2007

My boss encourages me to keep emails as short as possible because clients seem to have a terminally short attention span. It does work, to a degree.. I find that shorter emails are more likely to be replied to (even if the long ones contain important stuff).

However, I think if the same concept were applied to a blog – unless it was specifically created for the intention of display very short posts – we’d end up feeling dissatisfied. I know sometimes I expect more detail out of already long posts, God knows what I’d be craving if the world started writing in short sharp bursts.

(Plus, look at how much I just rambled… how the hell would I manage it?!)

Zaigham
Zaigham said on September 14, 2007

For emails, it sounds ok. But for blog I don’t think so, since on blog, readers are expecting to read the blogger’s opinion on the topic.
regards.

riel
riel said on October 01, 2007

In that case, just use twitter.

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