In response to
the article du jour about how these Internet-addicted kids today don't read right,
Kevin Drum lodges an interesting complaint against today's magazine writing:
[S]pending a lot of time on the internet, as I have since 2002, has rubbed my nose in something that hadn't really bothered me before then: namely just how overwritten so many books and magazine articles are. Seymour Hersh? He's great. You could also cut every one of his pieces by at least 50% and lose exactly nothing. And I'm not picking on Hersh. At a guess, I'd say that two-thirds of the magazine pieces I read could be sliced by nearly a third or more without losing much. That's true of a lot of books too.
So: crisper writing, please! One of the upsides of blogging (and the internet in general) is that it allows information to find its natural length: if something only needs a couple of paragraph, that's what it gets. If it needs 10,000 words, it gets that. But there's no need to pad because "we do long form journalism around here," just as there's no need to slash because you only have space for 40 column inches this week. Worriers take note.
A few brief thoughts. First, savor the irony here, since Drum's bloggish complaint isn't really be targeted at writers so much as editors. It's the latter's job to make sure a piece reads crisply and cleanly. With some magazines, a tension exists since writers are literally paid by the word. With other magazines, a tension exists because the writer will jealously guard his or her words. And, finally, with other magazines,
editors just screw up from time to time.
Regardless, it's amusing for a blogger to demand better editing of other writers. Not that Drum's wrong, mind you, but it's just a little strange. In the interest of fairness, perhaps bloggers could set up their own "editing fund" to help pare down Glenn Greenwald or (retroactively) Stephen Den Beste.
Second, one mild dissent. In my experience, lengthier essays do not work as well on the web as they do in print. Maybe, like Kevin, it's because of my upbringing reading books and such, but I find there's a limit to how much text I will scan on one page on a computer screen. Scrolling down is not as satisfying as turning a page. I read lengthy online essays the old-fashioned way -- I burn through my toner cartridge and print that sucker.
I'm curious if this is simply a failing of mine or if younger Internet-addicted folk feel the same way.
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