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Pragmatic Maciej
Pragmatic Maciej

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Long article, or many small ones. What do you prefer?

What is preferable to read, long content, or small one, but many in the series. Maybe there is ideal size of the article? What is your opinion here?

Top comments (6)

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practicingdev profile image
Practicing Developer • Edited

The ideal article size is whatever happens to fit your chosen topic, your available time, and your writing style. As long as you can tell a good story and keep people engaged, length isn't important one way or another.

That said, a long article needs to be well structured and have clear stopping points to be likely to be read and appreciated.

On the other hand, short articles that are not able to stand on their own and are actually more like sections of a long article can be a bit tedious to read. This concern is amplified if they are published with a good amount of time between them where the reader may lose context and need to re-establish it each time they read the next article in the series.

Short articles which are capable of standing on their own but yet can also be chained together to tell a larger story about a particular theme can be great, and once they're all out in the world, it's entirely possible to edit them together into a longer format (it takes some rewriting but can generate a new and useful piece of material)

What kind of things are you looking to write about? If you have some specific ideas in mind I may be able offer some suggestions on how to approach them.

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macsikora profile image
Pragmatic Maciej

Thanks for such long opinion. I am thinking how to split my future series, generally my question is about article dispersion, what is preferable.

My personal take is short articles, as I see that I cannot go through some longer ones, mostly because limited time, and secondly because story is just not interesting enough in longer term, and it is hard to continue to the end.

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practicingdev profile image
Practicing Developer

It seems like if in doubt, small is better simply because it is easier to go small->big than it is to plot an oversized frame for your story and then need to fill in all the gaps later.

But don't overemphasize the question of ideal length, just try things out and see what works for you and your readers, and let your work evolve over time based on what you learn.

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nombrekeff profile image
Keff

Totally agree, nice advice!

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nombrekeff profile image
Keff

I usually prefer short, direct to the point articles from 2 to 8 minutes read. Although from time to time I like to read an in-depth article about a topic.

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sebbdk profile image
Sebastian Vargr

Shorter is always better.

It takes so much more effort/time to do tho. :/