It has been a point of debate pretty much since the start of our community... how long is an ideal post? How long does a post need to be, in order to be considered "quality" content? Does quality even matter? Is quality the same thing as adding value?
This sort of discussion is by no means unique to Hive — I have seen it pop up on virtually every writing and blogging site I have been part of, going back all the way to about 1998.
Some people think there must be a "magic formula," and if they just follow that magic formula... then they are doing it right. In the case of Hive, they'll maximize their rewards.
Frankly? It's not that simple.
Now, while I have been fighting with editors — magazine and otherwise — over this particular issue for as long as I have been a writer, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: The "right" length for an article or a blog post is precisely as many words as it takes you to feel like you have gotten across what you wanted to get across.
And that might be 100 words or less — or even a tweet — or it might be 3,000 words of prose. End of story.
I have historically found that most ideas are neither tweets nor dissertations... they are right in the middle somewhere.
The "problem" is not about length so much as it is about this notion that there is a formula for getting it right.
And yes, I know lots of us were taught formulaic writing in school. The infamous "five paragraph essay" haunts many people for life. You know, it has to have a "beginning, middle and end" and those must be bracketed by an "introductory statement" and a "conclusion statement" at the end.
Bah! Humbug! says I...
The biggest improvement in my personal writing came when I stopped obsessing over the "rules" of writing and just wrote.
Here's an idea for you: Quality actually suffers when people start to worry more about fitting into a formulaic box than about what they are trying to convey.
I got to thinking about this today when I came across some old paper journals and noticed the huge differences in post lengths, from a couple of paragraphs to eight pages of handwritten rambling. The common thread: say what you need to say!
The other relevant point concerns authenticity. Writers tend to lose their genuine voice when they have to fit into some preconceived box. Creative writing that has too many fences and rules around it soon enough ends up not being creative at all.
Anyway... I do think that when we worry to much about the question of "what is the right length," we're asking the wrong question. We'd be better off asking "what makes this interesting enough that people might want to read it," and go from there.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!
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Created at 2025.05.17 01:46 PDT
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