Too many words.

 

(2.5 minute read.)

Change or be changed.

            Hello.  My name is Keith.  I use too many words.  I’m wordy.  Really wordy.

            And so begins the addicted to words meeting. 

            I’m a paper and pen guy living in a sound bite society.  I still hand write letters.  To make matters worse I write in calligraphy.  Over the years I have developed my own style.  There was a time when I had lots of people to write to.  Family.  Friends.  Not so much anymore.  I’m aging out of letter writing.

            Back in the day I was active in union politics.  I was part of a group that wanted to make the union more democratic and responsive to the rank and file.  We failed, but we did have to learn the nuts and bolts of politicking and producing our own work.  Those skills came in handy a time or two over the years.

            One of the things that we learned in regard to campaign material is that campaign material has a limited life span before it’s discarded.  The conventional wisdom was that if you handed someone something it would be disposed of in the first trash can that the person reached, if they even waited that long.  Technology hasn’t changed the campaign field all that much other than everything is available everywhere all at once. 

            The attention span of people hasn’t changed all that much either.  It’s just different.  I was reading an article where they had studied people using social media.  The average time spent after people clicked on something before clicking on something else was 10 seconds.  I suppose we can thank ads, memes, texting, reels and tik tok for that.  It was a matter of conditioning.  Like being in a fight.

Bob and weave!

Doing it again.

            I’ve already used too many words telling people that I use too many words.  If someone was surfing in off the internet and ran across this post I would already have lost them.  Too many words.  Too much text.  Too dense.  Not enough white space.  No pretty pictures or catchy phrases.  When I wrote an underground newsletter, I was often told that I was writing over people’s heads. 

            What brought this post about is that I wrote a piece about a post that was circulating on the internet concerning Bryan Cranston and a guy named Whitlock.  The post title was “The key word is again.”  The version that I posted was a 3.5-minute read.  However, the first version that I worked on was a 20-minute read and over 4,000 words long.  I may go ahead and post it anyway.  It’s title is “Better dead than red.”

            What does this mean?  Surely there’s a meaning for this post.  The meaning is that I appreciate the time that you took to read my stuff.  Time is a precious commodity.

Thank you.