When a long read can seem short
The expression “tl;dr” — online slang for “too long; didn’t read” — is officially 10 years old, at least according to Oxford, which added it to some dictionaries in 2013. But it is at least twice as old as that.
Talk has always been cheap, but the internet made writing almost as cheap, and even in its early days readers and editors got fed up and invented tl;dr as a more polite way of saying “shut up and get to the point.”
This is what Shakespeare meant 400 years ago with that line in Hamlet: “Brevity is the soul of wit.”
The famous apology, often misattributed to Mark Twain — “if I’d had more time I would have written a shorter letter” — makes a similar point.
Newspaper editors have been battling wordiness for centuries, slashing needless adjectives and extraneous sentences from articles, often much to the chagrin of writers.
Sometimes there simply isn’t enough paper to fit it all in.
Ironically, lazy writers are taking advantage of modern digital infinity, without realizing published writers get more concise with each century. Podcasts and audio books are ever more popular. As great as they were, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and even Shakespeare are too wordy and too much work for most people today.
Newsrooms now have data that tell us how much time readers are spending with stories, and it can be sobering. But it can also be inspiring. Long articles have their place.
Readers, especially subscribers, are inclined to spend more time with The Spectator, both online and in print, and are often willing to indulge writers who can engage them.
Like a good novel, some stories require more than a glance or momentary consideration, but a commitment from readers to allow themselves to be drawn into a terrific tale.
In today’s paper, for example, is a story by Susan Clairmont and Bambang Sadewo called “The Family” about a group of people who prayed, worked and lived together in a mansion in rural Burlington, until, well, it all went sour in a flurry of allegations and a courtroom drama. It is a riveting piece.
Another terrific article appeared last weekend, by Jon Wells. It tells the story of the beloved tenor Luciano Pavarotti’s infamous no-shows in Hamilton 25 years ago. An oral history, it is the verbatim remembrances of those who experienced it firsthand. It is nostalgic, enlightening and quite hilarious.
A good news agency tells stories and shares information in many different ways — short and long, triumphant and tragic, hilarious and outrageous. If they are done well, the longest stories can often seem the shortest.