I wanted to write something short and pithy and insightful for Facebook or Twitter or some other minimalist thing and couldn't come up with anything. The ultrashort format is not suited to ruminations on things you don't completely understand and are trying to work out in the process of writing about them.
Instead I will go for a walk.
Perhaps this is a rumination on the length of communications, their immediacy and the expected audience.
You have a wide choice of how long to make your message, and how much complexity you want to embed in what you have to say.
Some messages can only be told verbally over and over again for quite a while until they are ready to write down. Alas, the seduction of very short form writing leads us to think that we are talking, rather than writing, when we use them. That's not quite true.
Every so often I write something and the reader (the editor) says "huh?" That usually happens when the writing process happens during the discovering process and by the time I figure something out in 10 paragraphs the first paragraph doesn't make sense anymore.
Edward Vielmetti's Wordpress weblog 