“Most long-form is bad,” Alex Balk writes in a recent, decidedly short-form post on the Awl. “The problem arises from the ‘long’ part. If you need more than 600 words to say what you need to say you are trying too hard for accolades or you’re getting paid by the word.”
Just yesterday the Reader published a story Alex Balk would probably hate. “Tl;dr,” he’d sniff, scrolling quickly past the feature’s 12,496 words.
Still, there’s one sensible point Balk makes in his anti-long-form post: “It is unfortunate that society conflates length with depth and quantity with complexity,” he says. Effective, concise writing, after all, is a difficult, admirable craft. (“I didn’t have time to write a short letter,” goes the old adage, “so I wrote a long one instead.”)
