From time to time I fantasise about writing blog posts in the style of Dickens or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.
I write a good deal of content for consumption by people on the internet who have limited, and narrowing, attention spans.
To counter this I have employed a technique which writers for the internet, bloggers, and content marketers are advised to use. This involves short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, and lots of white space.
One of the objectives of this technique is to make the content as snackable and accessible as possible. And I know it works because people frequently tell me they love reading my stuff, that I make it easy to read and understand, and so forth.
This is not an accident for this is precisely what I set out to do.
But sometimes I dream about writing a blog post in one or two long sentences-in the style of Charles Dickens, for example.
And I imagine throwing in words that are not short and simple and have only one syllable. But words that are difficult, obscure, rarely used but appropriate for the situation. Words and phrases like ‘dissipation’, ‘urbanity’, ‘agreeable’, ‘disagreeable’, ‘displeasure’, ‘much engaged’, ‘prodigiously’, ‘melancholy’, ‘admonition’, ‘withering scorn’, ‘much occupied by his sagacity’, ‘unreserved intimacy’, ‘unquiet spirit’, and so forth.
Maybe one day, for the sheer hell of it, I will ‘fall to prodigiously’ and break loose.
P.S. All the words and phrases in the paragraph above are from ‘Dombey & Son’ by Charles Dickens, a novel I would recommend enthusiastically.
Especially if you love words.