The Long and Short of It

If you believe Yahoo Answers, there’s a sentence in Les Misérables that is 823 words long. I can’t verify this allegation because I dozed off between word 96 and word 97.

Since I make my living as a copywriter, people who often go by the title C.D. “creative director,” or more accurately “creative dictator,” want my sentences to be as short as possible. My ad headlines have to be truncated to the point of being limbless.  If a copywriter fights off the temptation to write in paragraphs and uses bullet points instead, so much the better.

After I got used to bullet points shooting my creativity at point blank range, along came websites to engage their spinnerets, trap my pithy ruminations and devour them. Websites are all about clicking, not reading. I get it, but what I don’t get is why some sick puppy came up with the idea of trying to say something worthwhile in 140 characters? I’d give anything to see Victor Hugo try and write a tweet, wouldn’t you?