When less is more

Now, please be honest.

Will you read this article if it’s two pages long? You must have already begun scanning alternate lines, trying to make sense of the few words that catch your eye. Never mind reading it fully.

Did you pause to update your FB status message? Or check your friend’s tweet? There, barely two paragraphs down, our article has stiff competition.

Alright, we’ll stop rambling and come to the point. Which is this: the average online write-up has to be short and simple to get your attention. It has to be lucid and pithy. The luxury of many, many, words are for the winding features and articles in print publications (or for (a few) blog posts and write-ups on established forums). Not for the humble online write-up, which has to appear easy-on-the-eye and compete with 140-character messages for your time and patience.

This brings us to the question. If online writing is about keeping it succinct and simple, how will the traditional pay-per-word approach motivate writers? Here, the challenge is to crunch thoughts and ideas into fewer words. (A slightly more difficult task, we’d say, as compared to elaborating about them in numerous paragraphs.) In other words, less is more effective. Less is more desirable.

So, shouldn’t writers be paid more to keep it less? Instead of measuring an article’s worth through its number of words, shouldn’t we look at the quality of a write-up and pay more for shorter, well-written pieces?

What do you think? Let us know.