Goodbye, thousand-word Proustian tea-soaked-cake memories and Bloomian stream-of-consciousness fantasies.
Today’s online readers succinctly condemn excessively long text in four words: “Too Long; Didn’t Read.” Even that caustic critique takes too much effort for impatient readers; thus, the abbreviation: TLDR.
Throughout literature, platforms such as the sonnet have imposed constraints, challenging writers to express themselves within predetermined limits. But Twitter compelled a sea-change. Overnight, we became restricted to 140 characters, including punctuation and spaces.
As a Tweeter, Facebooker and Blogger for my clients, I have learned to operate within the new paradigm by following Strunk and White’s timeless, terse advice: “Omit needless words.”
‘Nuff said!
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