Now and then I read blog posts or discussions about the right length of a blog post. Some say that the correct length is about 300 to 470 words other ones tell such numbers depend on the blog general focus (news vs how-to-blog for example).
I cannot understand these discussions. In my opinion a blog post is like every other documentation. News is documentation and a project concept is also documentation. Sure, that depending on the character or type of the documentation there may be a tendency of shorter or longer size.
As many others I got taught in school often for specific home- or teamworks that those documents must be at least n words. Although the basic reason might have been to develop the skill of writing in many cases it caused me to let flow the creativity and inventing sentences that filled up the sheet.
It is a lot more difficult to collect more knowledge and write that information in a compact but still good understandable form. Because of plenty sentences added to text unnecessarily there come up needs of fast reading techniques eliminating the "polystyrene" in text.
A news article, project documentation, blog post or whatever piece of written text should be no more and no less than necessary to transfer the knowledge or the intended condition of the spirit. So don't intend to produce a certain length of text. Focus on the main intention of the text and write as much as needed to achieve that - no more, no less.
Certainly this is not an easy job and actually I am not sure if I got it right. ;-)
Related posts: How many posts must I write?, Tell not more and not less.
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