🎧Write Less, Please [updated 2024]
Become a more skilled, versatile, deep-thinking writer
Hello!
I hope you’re well and writing.
When this post first appeared, it created some controversy. It even sparked an excellent counter-post—“Against Branding (and Sarah Fay)”—from the excellent
. (I joked that his post would have been better if it had been shorter.)I’m not against long-form. I write long-form. I teach long-form at Northwestern. One of my long-form essays, “On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets]),” appeared on Longreads (note the name) and was a notable mention in Best American Essays.
“Long-form” is now considered anything over 800-1500 words. (There was a time when long-form was anything over 3000-5000 words. No longer.)
If you’re offering great writing on Substack, write as much as you want. Or give your subscribers the audio option.1 (More on this below.)
“Great” writing doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be a great stylist, journalist, or literary writer; it can also translate into being masterfully personable (which doesn’t mean talking about yourself all the time).2
But very few people on Substack are doing that.
What’s below is just data—numbers to show you readers’ habits. Plus, below I give you two easy ways to write shorter posts and a tip if you still really want to write long-form.
This post is also meant to free those who think you should write a lot. More doesn’t equal better.3 We think it does, but it absolutely doesn’t, especially in the era of subscription fatigue.
Read on and enjoy!
Write Less, Please: Become a more skilled, versatile, deep-thinking writer
I have bad news, good news, and very good news.
The bad news: Most of your readers don’t finish your lengthy posts and a view doesn’t necessarily mean someone read what you wrote.
The good news: The data on our subscribers’ reading habits could be demoralizing, but I invite us to see it as an opportunity to become more skilled, versatile, deep-thinking writers.
The truth: We don’t write in a vacuum. A Substack newsletter is a medium and a genre. Like books, magazines, newspapers, fiction, nonfiction, and journalism, it has demands and constraints—and readers with preferences.
The point here isn’t to encourage the spewing of shallow, short posts but to distill long drafts into short posts that give our readers depth, dimension, and emotion in under eight hundred or a thousand words.
The very good news: Once we have our readers’ trust and they know we aren’t sending our every thought and respect that they’re busy, we can send the occasional long-form post—but only if the topic and writing warrants it or you’re using audio.4
Some of you tell yourselves that your readers love your long posts because they like or comment or share. Not necessarily. Fact: Most will comment, like, and share without reading (!).
It’s important to note that we’re being read in three different places: on a desktop, on the app, or in email.
The data
Online
Most of your subscribers stop reading after about 118 words.
Most skim/scan, taking in the first sentence and then “word spotting” in an F or Z pattern.
Mobile
0 to 1 percent read 1000 words.5 If you have a hundred “views,” somewhere between no one and one person makes it to 1000 words.
Inboxes
Over 80 percent of your readers scan your entire email.
Nearly all are dealing with a stress-inducing number of emails, and many crave the coveted zero inbox and desperately want to delete your newsletter.
Either way
Because they’re reading on screen, they’ll have a surface-level reading experience that will prevent them from remembering, analyzing, drawing comparisons about, or feeling empathy as a result of your post.
Reading a lot on screen or being Gen Z doesn’t change that.6
The good news
All this should come as a relief. The idea that long posts are better than short posts simply isn’t true:
A long post doesn’t signal you worked hard but you didn’t work hard enough—perhaps. It could mean you didn’t take the time to edit or master the medium and give your readers what they want. “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.” ~Blaise Pascal, 16577
Length doesn’t equal greater creativity or artistry.
More words don’t create complexity or depth. Think of the three s’s: synthesis, selection, and subtext.
There’s no word count. English class is over.
(Somewhere between 65 to 90 percent of you stopped reading before I got to the very good news below even though I’ve employed tactics like hyperlinked words that give credibility, no pull quotes or subscribe buttons with a caption in the middle of the text that stop you from reading, and lots of bullets and headings to keep you interested.)
The very good news
No amount of branding, GIFs (ugh), or photos will make people read more so no need to waste time on Canva unless you love Canva. Quite the opposite—the more visual noise on a page, the likelier we are to skim.
Substack has set up ideal conditions for our subscribers—i.e., reader view.
And if you love long-form, just do it wisely and intentionally:
As I said, audio is the way.
How people read depends on their purpose: information or pleasure.8 Those who read for pleasure/interest may read word-for-word, whereas “information foragers” dart around.
People will spend more time on long-form articles but at most four minutes, i.e., 800 to 1000 words.
Ultimately, writing less will make you a better writer. It’s harder to figure out what we’re saying and distill it instead of rambling along. Writing less, especially if you’re early on in your trajectory as a Substack writer or writer, will make you more skilled and versatile and require you to think more deeply.
For Substack Writers at Work members, below are 2 easy tips for writing short, compelling posts + 1 if you still really want to write long-form…
2 easy ways to write short, compelling posts + 1 tip if you still really want to write long-form
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