Those of you who have been reading my posts may have noticed that the last post (If you ride commuter trains, this could save your life!) had a markedly different look about it. I have been taking a class on how to expand your following – your “tribe.” Among the tenets of this group is that in order to keep the reader’s attention you must make your post scannable (by a reader, not a machine), and to do that you must limit paragraphs to 3 or 4 lines. And, within those lines you must entice the reader to go on to the next paragraph. This is following the logic of Twitter that today’s readers have an attention span of about 140 characters.
I agree that with the billions (trillions?) of pages on the internet most people just scan search results quickly and go on to the next. And it seems that many on the internet are trying to monetize their website – that is, make money off it. But that is not my aim. I want to make people think about things that they don’t often think about, and in different ways. My style is to tell a story, not just state facts or ideas in bullet form.
So I will tell my stories – my way. For those of you who don’t want to read more than a few lines or bullets I hold no grudge. You are just not my tribe.
Featured image: Andy Rooney – Storyteller