The Grasshopper Sunday Edition, April 23, 2023: Readability

Things are different on screens

The old way, which still works! Photo by Elijah Hail on Unsplash

As a writer who has written and published millions of words over the years, I resisted the formatting advice I received when I moved to writing online. Everything has to be optimized for those with a limited attention span. I don’t completely agree with that.

But that advice turned out to be important and effective.

It basically says keep it simple and open with plenty of whitespace and short, catchy sentences. It turns out there are very good reasons for this. Lengthy paragraphs and big blocks of uninterrupted text are hard to read online unless you are using a large monitor, which is not the way most readers consume information these days.

You’ll notice I always leave spaces between paragraphs to open things up. And when I can, I try to only convey one thought per block of text. It’s basically chunking information into bite sized bits.

Other advice includes using subheads frequently that can be skimmed to get a quick view of what the article is about. To some degree many of the recommendations are designed to help readers keep moving through your work.

While there are good reasons for using these things to make your work more accessible, I do not slavishly adhere to them all the time. I like a beautifully constructed sentence and paragraph and sometimes that requires breaking the rules.

In those cases I think of it as the pursuit of elegance over blunt simplicity. You want your work to sing to the reader, with rhythm and cadence. It doesn’t always happen but when it does you can sense it.

I still use longer sentences a lot of the time but these guidelines have made me more aware of opportunities to break them up during editing. It adds a beat to the writing that is more percussive.

I find articles that use too many subheads to be distracting, so I limit my use of them. I believe my readers are readers because they love the power of words rather than simply valuing something because it is brief.

Ultimately, readability is the goal, even when it means paring back your beautiful diatribes. I try to find the middle ground.

There is some degree of generational change going on here. For example, the most successful writers, on Medium for example, often separate every sentence with white space. That appeals to younger readers wanting quick insights. 

My readers skew older which is not surprising as I am older and write about topics that are more serious and more emotional at the same time. That’s the balancing act I strive for these days.

So, listen to the advice but find your own path to it.

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“One of the things I’ve noticed in my 35+ years of writing is that, in my process, everything is always changing.  The method changes.  The truisms become untrue.  What worked last book is worn out now.  I can be giving advice while not following it myself.”

~ George Saunders from his Substack newsletter Story Club With George Saunders

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Fridays are different now

Not working a traditional 40 hour week, M-F, changes your perspective. And getting older and having many of your friends in the same circumstances further distances me from the weekend feeling any different from the workweek.

It’s Friday morning and I am writing. I’ll be writing tomorrow and Sunday and most days. It’s what I do and it fills a void that my various jobs never did. I make a fraction of what I used to when I was a software marketing executive but I make it work. Americans think they need more money than they do, but that is the American way.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not promoting the starving artist thing. That cliche has hurt a lot of creators who felt that money was something evil, a sign of selling out. Most of the writers and artists I admire do very well because they treat their work as their primary thing in life.

That’s why I take pleasure in saying I am a writer when asked what I do. I’ve always been a writer but it was never my principal job title. But these days it is exactly what I do, full time, every day I can. And it is a gift to realize that. 

Btw, ‘full time’ in writing is likely not an eight hour day. Sometimes half that or less.

So, TGIF. But only because it is another day to live this life. And it happens to be a beauty. 

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The numbers game

According to my Substack credits, The Grasshopper, a place for writers, is read across 46 US states and 53 countries.

Wow is my reaction. Especially the 53 countries metric. That is the power of this platform that has few borders. 53 countries. And my subscriber base is not that large, though it grows every day.

I finally got The Witness Chronicles up and running. You’ll see it as a section in my menu bar and get the emails just like any other thing I post here. And you can unsubscribe from it without losing the main sub to The Grasshopper. It’s a place for me to feature my political, climate, and current events writing. Because it is pretty stridently liberal I wondered whether it would generate a backlash of some sort, like a wave of unsubscribes. But so far, so good. 

One of the articles I published there on Florida no longer being a viable place to live has taken on a life of its own. Originally published on Medium, it has racked up 30,000 views but there is a catch. 28,000 of them are on external sources so I don’t get paid for them (that’s the way Medium works).

But it isn’t doing too bad there. And I got a note from Medium that this morning it was Boosted, which is Medium’s new curation. Theoretically that means the article will get wider distribution on the platform. I’ll be watching the numbers this weekend.

Coincidentally or not, Substack also has a promotional program they call Boost which claims to do the same thing, though it is harder to track with their metrics. The Substack Boost thing was rolled out about a month or two before the Medium version. Bit of a competition? You bet.

Anyone in marketing knows competition is a sign of having a healthy business. If there are no competitors, it typically means the market is not big enough, a bad sign because growth prospects are limited. If you write and publish, having more than one place to do it is pretty cool. Especially if the cost of entry is nothing or next to nothing. Medium is fifty bucks a year but that is nothing compared to its potential.

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Notes, Twitter, Mastodon, why?

I have a Twitter account that goes back to its inception but I never look at it. My brain just doesn’t process information so randomly and I never saw much benefit in it. Only so much bandwidth.

But now I have a presence on two more tweety things, Mastodon and Substack’s Notes, which was just introduced. The Mastodon incidence is a Medium thing and you must be a paying member to join under their banner, md.em. I won’t try to explain how Mastodon works because it is geeky beyond belief* but it was set up to offer an alternative to Twitter. 

*It is seriously the most nerdy bizarre way to build a network I’ve ever seen, with its own terminology and arcane rules. The developer mind is a different animal.

I’m trying to see how these new media can be leveraged to promote my writing, but it’s hard to maintain without being in it constantly and feeding the feed. So my participation has been sparse. Maybe one day it will click in my head how to use this stuff but so far, not so much.

Somehow this morning’s ramblings have added up to a whole, though disjointed, newsletter. I think I need to get out and take a walk and smell the flowering trees which are bursting into bloom right now.

Thanks for your patience. Did you write today?

Martin

1357 words

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