EDITORletter

Your editor with Joe-Pye Weed at the Mt. Cuba Center by Carrie Engel.

Is This Short Enough?

“Too long.” That is what some of the online reviewers are saying about my recent book about urban gardening with Teri Speight. They don’t mean the overall book length, they mean the individual topic entries, which are all between 400–500 words each. I had thought the entries were super-short, but maybe I’m a fastreader? So I looked it up and found that “the average reader will read 450 words in 1.5 minutes.” That’s right: 90 seconds per topic is too long for many readers these days! This was a revelation to me. Our publisher had stressed the importance of short entries and had set the 500-word limit. I thought that was a bit arbitrary, but now I see what they (and probably most other book publishers) are dealing with. People want to read books, but they don’t actually want to “read” them. Skimmable text with lots of lists, subheads, photos, and bullet points are how we read online, so now that is how we want to digest our books. As most professional writers know, it is much easier to write lengthy articles than to distill a topic into a shorter one. Boiling a topic down to just the few relevant points in a clear, concise way can be a challenge. One of my first jobs out of college was excerpting longer newspaper stories for a business news service and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I like writing limits and enjoy the challenge, but there are still times when a subject is far too complex for a short article. I thought this photo of me from a recent trip to the Mt. Cuba Center outside of Wilmington, DE, with the Ladies in the Landscape group was the perfect illustration for this point, because the foreshortening effect makes my torso look oddly longer than my legs, when I’m actually fairly average in both height and leg length. So, dear readers, what is the perfect article length? It depends. We’ll always strive to keep our writing tight while giving the subject the full attention it deserves.

Sincerely,

Credits

Kathy Jentz Editor/Publisher Washington Gardener 826 Philadelphia Ave. Silver Spring, MD 20910 Phone: 301-588-6894 kathyjentz@gmail.com www.washingtongardener.com

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Jamie Oberg Victoria Vandergriff Interns

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Volume 17, Number 5 ISSN 1555-8959 © 2022 Washington Gardener All rights reserved. Published monthly.

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