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Are long blog entries better than short ones?

After having attended one of your great Blog Smart workshops, I've taken the plunge and am now starting a weblog of my own. What I'm not sure of, however, is how much to write in each entry. I've seen some weblogs that have one-liners, lots of them, and others, like your Intuitive Life that has much longer articles. What's your recommendation?

Dave's Answer:

This is one of the holy wars in the world of blogging, as far as I can tell. I read a wide variety of blogs on dozens of different topics and find that the articles therein range from so-called linkblogs, one line 'Here's a nice article about X' type of entries to blogs where the author or authors clearly view their blog as a magazine and each entry as a feature article.

My colleague Debbie Weil blogged about blogger Pat Cleary's own guidelines for his National Association of Manufacturers blog, including the comment that "he tries to keep his entries short but finds that a natural length for him is 500 words. Too long for a typical blog post..."

But, of course, who decides what's too long and what's too short?

If you said either "the reader" or "the writer", give yourself a pat on the back. You're exactly right. There are no editors, no layout people, no standards body, nor government regulators involved here. And thank goodness for that!

I'm reminded of a common piece of advice from good development editors in the publishing business about how long a chapter or book should ultimately be: write just enough to cover the material at the appropriate level of detail, then stop.

As you've noticed, my tendency is towards long postings. I find that 2-3 paragraphs is just starting to wrap a context around the point I want to make. But I'm a professional writer and can produce 750-1000 words on a topic without even adding any adjectives. :-)

Personally, I don't subscribe to weblogs where the typical entry is less than about 250 words, because I'm not interested in discoverability, that is, what other pages on the Web I should be checking out, but in why the blogger thinks the page, article, site, entry, whatever, is worth my attention.

It's darn surprising to me how few bloggers explain their motivation behind a link, however, so we are surrounded by a sea of frequent, ridiculously succinct blog entries like "Dave has some good thoughts on blog entry length."

In summary, I'm not the arbiter of entry length, I can only share my personal preferences and explain why my own weblog entries are atypically long. I think that the most important thing is for you to find a length that matches your topic and writing style, then give yourself the freedom to vary on a per-article basis.

I'm pretty sure that Stephen Streight, blogging as Vaspers the Grate, has done some research on average blog article length, so perhaps he'll pop up and share some of his findings in this regard?

And for the rest of you, dear readers, do share your preference: lots of short, succinct entries, or a smaller number of longer, more thoughtful articles?

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Comments

HI,

make it long if you have something worthwhile to say.

Otherwise, make it short.

long or short, you should have something worthwhile to read. If you write your blog to please yourself, then that is fine, but you have to be prepared to behappy whether people read or not.

Posted by: wilson ng at July 20, 2005 2:59 PM

I think you have made the point exactly -- that is, when I read a blog which refers to another site, I want to know *why* or "what's up with that". Just giving me the link is not sufficient, unless I know you well enough to know you know me well enough to just slip me a naked link.

When I was actively blogging [technical issues have knocked me out of the ring, and will keep me down for at least another year], I added enough commentary to explain why the link was important. Sometimes the referred item demanded explanation or discussion [e.g. it was providing one among many POV on a complex topic] so the entry would be long. Other times [e.g. a good white paper on a technical topic] the entry would be spartanly laconic -- because the paper should speak for itself.

Posted by: John Howard Oxley at August 9, 2005 2:29 AM

I subscribe to Dave's opinion.

I tend to write longer posts...and I hope they are a little more developed. In my short posts, I find myself trying to be *cute*, although, many of my short posts are "short and sweet".

The reason I'm commenting here is that I asked Bill French if my posts, or my other authors posts, were too long. He deferred to Dave's post here.

Thanks Dave...what I got from your post is any length is okay...if you do it well.

I was worried I was more writing a magazine or newspaper, rather than a bloggy post.

My decision...I'll just let it flow and see if someone out there likes what I write.

Posted by: Jeff Miller at September 5, 2005 7:50 PM

Hi i just started the wonderful world of blogging today, im still playing with mine fairly new to it and was wondering what you thought about have say a paragraph from a longer blog and put a link to the full blog in your blogging site? is this the same thing as linking as you were saying before? im curious to understand all of this being virginal so to speak lol!!
Thanks, Kelly x (feel free to email me)

Posted by: Kelly Martin at January 8, 2007 3:56 PM

Kelly, I think that there are two questions here. First, there's the legal question: you can't just copy and paste long excerpts of someone else's article without violating their copyright (even if they don't state that they have one explicitly). Secondly, there's best practice, and in that case I can just recommend strongly that you always make sure that your final article has at least 20% more words that are yours than the source you're quoting. Make sense?

Posted by: Dave Taylor at January 8, 2007 11:56 PM

Hi Dave, thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I dont think I was clear in my post. What I meant was my own posts, I wouldnt be using someone elses. I tried this morning with a few but I dont think I will do it anymore. Like you I do long blog entries and I thought I could put a short paragraph posted and then put a link "to read more click here.." and then it would take you to the full blog entry. However, I wasnt thinking properly as it would mean doubling up of blogs and also when I post new ones the old ones will get all confused lol!! doh! im going to delete the short ones later on. Unless you know other ways to do this.

If im making sense ?

Posted by: Kelly Martin at January 9, 2007 7:01 AM

I wrote something about that a few weeks ago and did multivariate testing to back up a theory. On social media sites, the average reader assimilates 200 words per minute, granted they will dedicate about 2-3 minutes ingesting your information ideally if you can hit the 400 word mark and make your point, traction and stickiness is accomplished. But once again, reading is a commitment for most, it really is based on your audience and their preference.

Posted by: Joe Richart at February 10, 2008 11:42 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!