In recent times I've been writing 80-word blurbs for print collateral. Yeah, print—it's dead, right? Anyway, the thing is, I keep getting to 45 or so words and thinking, "All this other information's kind of superfluous. No one needs to know that. Why can't we just stop here?"
Also, this: those narrow columns they print in New Scientist are so charmingly narrow, and the paras are so delightfully short, that one barely needs to move ones eyes horizontally to read them. Run your eye down the column and your peripheral vision will pick up the words you're not looking at directly. That, my friends, is freaking handy.
So what? So what is that shorter is better in practically all media (if you ask me), and the less it feels like reading, the more I'm likely to enjoy, er, reading (or for that matter, writing) it.
I know what you're thinking: everyone knows this. Well, if everyone knows it, then why are we still being tortured with long copy, poorly laid out? Hmmmm?
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