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Marketers, Put Analogies, Similes, and Metaphors to Work for You

What’s the difference between metaphors, similes, and analogies? Not a lot, unless you’re a word nerd like me.

Short answer: Metaphors describe an idea; similes do the same, but use “like” or “as.” Analogies are that mystery comparison that we all pretend to know what it means, but we really think it’s a simile.

Ann Handley recently wrote in her Total Annarchy newsletter about the importance of analogies.

In Marketing, analogies pack a lot in a tiny overhead bin space.

They can help us explain convoluted ideas or applications more simply. They can help our audiences understand what we do or what we sell.

And (important!) analogies can help us be more memorable.

When it comes to writing, there are three types of analogies we can use. And they’re so similar, they’re easy to get confused. Hell, I wrote this article, and I’m still not entirely clear on what they mean!

Metaphors:

A metaphor compares two things, one to the other, but doesn’t use the words “like” or “as.” They’re more powerful and almost make a strong commitment to the comparison.

As George Savile once said, “Men’s words are bullets that their enemies take up and make use of against them.”

Or William Shakespeare in As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.”

Did you see it? Men’s words are bullets. They’re not like bullets, they ARE bullets. And all the men and women (are) merely players. Not like, are.

Metaphors tend to be more poetic and you can create greater imagery with them.

They’re also morally superior to similes. (More on that in a minute.)

Similes:

The weasel word of the comparison game! I’m not a fan of similes because they are weaker than metaphors. The big difference between a simile and a metaphor is the words “like” or “as.”

“Life is like a box of chocolates,” Forrest Gump famously said. He didn’t want to commit to the image, so he said it’s only like a box of chocolates.

Weasel!

Similes compare two unlike items in order to create meaning at a deeper level. “My love is like a red, red rose, That’s newly sprung in June,” said Robert Burns.

If I were Mrs. Burns (Jean Armour), I’d be worried about that relationship: He can’t commit to a metaphor, but he’s going to commit to you?

(Burns was also a noted philanderer, so this should have been a clue to Armour.)

Other similes include “as blind as a bat,” “as clumsy as an ox,” and “like watching paint dry.”

Analogies:

Part metaphor, part simile, all argument. That is, an analogy is a type of argument or explanation that compares two items but in relation to each other as a way to explain one of the items.

“Our latest company reorganization is about as useful as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” or “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.” (E.B. White)

But They All Look the Same.

Of course, when you really look at it, it’s hard to make a distinction between analogies and similes. Are similes the shorter aphorisms? “As blind as a bat” and “clumsy as an ox?” And are phrases like “Watching the play was like watching paint dry” analogies because they’re longer?

As I was researching this piece, I found article after article that mixed up the use of these three terms. But I found one explanation that seemed to explain the difference. As Robert Lee Brewer, senior editor of Writer’s Digest, said,

A metaphor is something, a simile is like something, and an analogy explains how one thing being like another helps explain them both.

See? Clear as mud.

Basically, the three terms can be used almost interchangeably and you could argue for days about whether “Life is like a box of chocolates” is a simile or an analogy.

<One of my favorite albums of all time is Tom Waits’ Nighthawks At The Diner, and I especially love the song, “Putnam County”. In it, Waits says the following verse.

And the impending squint of first light
And it lurked behind a weepin’ marquee in downtown Putnam
Yeah, and it’d be pullin’ up any minute now
Just like a bastard amber Velveeta yellow cab on a rainy corner
And be blowin’ its horn in every window in town

There, Waits uses a combination of metaphors and similes as a way to describe the morning sunlight banging on your windows after a hard night’s drinking. And you can see how he uses the devices for a most-powerful effect.

Regardless, the easy thing to remember is that similes (and analogies) use “like” or “as” and metaphors do not.

That makes metaphors more powerful and morally superior, but we’ll argue about that later.

Photo credit: CarbonNYC (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 2.0)

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Five Terrible Ways to Start a Blog Article and Five Good Ways

As a content writer, I cringe and writhe in pain when I see some content marketers’ openings — ledes, in journalism parlance — of their blog posts and journal articles. They’re cheap, amateurish, and they say absolutely nothing. They’re terrible ways to start a blog article, and they can wreck what might have been an otherwise good piece.

They’re so overused and hackneyed, I’m just embarrassed for them.

It’s one thing if they tried this lede in college and got a warm, squishy feeling about it, but the problem is no one told them not to do it again, and so they stuck with it.

Wait, wait! What’s a “lede?”

Lede (pronounced “leed”) is the intentional spelling of the word lead. However, you don’t always know how “lead” is pronounced until you know its context.

According to newspaper legend, reporters — whose stories were cast in lead (“led”) type — wanted to avoid confusion with the opening lines to their stories. And so people wouldn’t get confused and say lead instead of lead. Since they wrote a lead that was cast in lead, they needed to signify the difference. So they started using “lede” to mean the opening paragraph (“graf”) and “lead” to mean the soft metal.

But that’s not what you came here for.

The Five Terrible Ways to Start a Blog Article

1. Let’s face it.
I hate this one because it feels forced and we have to reluctantly accept what life has done to us. Like you and I have been going around and around trying to find our way out of a Locked Room game, and we don’t have the first clue to get out.

I’ll almost buy using this phrase near the end of an article, but not at the beginning.

2. Unless you’ve been under a rock.
I overheard someone use this on an anime podcast recently, talking about an anime movie that I had never even heard of. Basically, unless I had been living under a rock, I would know about this whole big kerfuffle surrounding this movie I’d never heard of.

This lede is actually rude because it insinuates your reader is a moron.

“Only a true moron wouldn’t know about this thing I’m about to tell you.”

My response to these is rude and vulgar, so I won’t repeat it.

3. The recipe lede.
“Take three part X, two parts Y, and one part Z, mix them together and you’ve got [insert story theme].” Blurg!

This one is hackneyed and overused. It works in nearly every situation, which means it’s not good for any of them. Gag me with a mixing spoon.

4. The high school research paper.
This is the one that gets directly to the point in the most boring way possible, usually as a way to shoehorn keywords into the opening paragraph.

“Most businesses need an accounting and bookkeeping system. Keeping track of your finances is the most important job for any business, and accounting software will help you do this.”

Sure, it’s factual, it’s to the point, and it’s so dull, it couldn’t cut through water.

A better lede might start with, “Entrepreneurs, do you remember when you started your business and all your invoices were done in Word and you hammered together some kind of balance sheet on Excel?” See the difference?

5. Statistics.
“There are 7 million blog articles published every day.”

You could lump this one with the high school paper lede. It’s informative, but it’s not exciting. I might appreciate that fact (which is true), but it doesn’t pull me into the story with any emotion. If you want me to care, tell me about one of those bloggers, not all 7 million of them.

Also, clicking that link takes you a real stinker of a lede — it’s written only for SEO purposes, and if I wasn’t promised a raft full of blogging stats, I wouldn’t read a word more of it:

“This article will reveal the most interesting blogging stats, facts, and trends. And answer the most common questions.”

Blurg!

The Five Good Ways to Start a Blog Article

So how should you start a blog article if you want it to be effective and interesting?

1. The Hard News Lede This actually is a boring way to start a story, but it’s soooo much better than any of the ones I mentioned above. Go look at a newspaper’s website and read some of the articles in their News section. They’ll all start with the hard news lede.

In this kind of lede, you answer the 5 W’s and 1 H: Who, what, where, when, why, and how. (Sometimes called the 6 W’s, where the how is replaced with “what significance.”)

Here’s an example:

“John Smith was shot as he tried to stop a hold-up attempt at KFC at 1234 Main Street at 12:38 pm. He was taken to Polk Memorial Hospital and listed in stable condition.”

You’ve got all 5 W’s and the H in that first sentence. (I just threw in the second sentence so you’d know John was OK. He appreciates your well-wishes.)

It’s not exciting, but it’s informative and well-done.

2. The “Features” Lede
The news lede is boring, but the features lede is much more interesting. In fact, features stories tend to be much more interesting than hard news stories.

“All John Smith wanted was a bucket of chicken. What he got was a trip to the hospital and a bullet wound to the thigh.”

They look at the Why of most news stories in general — this is where you find the interesting details about a news story. Investigative reporting happens here. Sports features happen here. Human interest. Historical stories. Social/community stories.

For a look at a great lede in a Pulitzer-winning story, check out the Tampa Bay Tribune’s Insane. Invisible. In Danger. stories, written by Leonora LaPeter Anton, Anthony Cormier, and Michael Braga.

3. Telling a story.
I don’t mean a long, meandering, 4-volume epic about Memaw’s Potato Salad preceding the actual recipe. But a nice 100-word story that builds tension or sets the stage for the information you’re about to impart.

Content marketers like to call themselves “storytellers,” yet they fail to tell a single story in all of their writing. I don’t mean just tell a story like, “That time I got lost in a foreign city with my dad.” You can tell brief stories to set the stage to a bigger idea. Story #3 in the Tampa Bay “Insane. Invisible. In Danger.” series does that in just seven grafs. Surely you can do that!

4. Look, stupid!
Now, let me stress that I do not recommend that you actually start a blog article with this phrase.

Rather, this is a great way to kick off an article when you’re stuck for a starting point. I’ve used this to kick off many how-to and informative articles. I could have started this article with:

“Look, stupid!

“Writing the opening of a blog article isn’t that hard, but that doesn’t mean you can be lazy about it. You need to grab your reader from the very first words, which means you can’t just phone in the lede.”

I write “Look, stupid!” then write the lede, and then go back and delete those first two words. The opening gets me exasperated with the reader and I can adopt an “I-love-you-but-you’re-killing-me-Smalls” tone. The lede is forceful, direct, and gets straight to the point.

5. The mystery.
Build a mystery with your opening and promise to solve it for the reader sometime before the end. Make sure the mystery is enticing — you can help that along by telling a story — and that the payoff is worth it.

“I remember going on a road trip with a friend in college. We drove 1,000 miles west with no real destination in mind and no idea what we would find. We just knew we wanted to leave Indiana for a week. What we found — and who we picked up on the way — changed our lives and sent us careening off the carefully-laid plans our parents had made for us.”

Isn’t that exciting? Don’t you want to know where we went, what we found, and who we picked up? I’ll bet that if I started a blog post that way, you’d gobble up the entire article trying to find out all the answers to the questions.

Unfortunately, it’s here at the end of the piece, and I’ve run out of time, so I guess you’ll never know.

(Just kidding. I made that stuff up.)

There are already 7 million blog articles being published each day, so there’s no point in trying to match the same level of boring mediocrity as everyone else. Stop using those bad ledes to start a blog article, because they’re just making your work sound terrible. A good blog post starts with a good lede and builds from there.

Write great ledes and the rest will follow.

Photo credit: Creative_Tomek (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Pick ONLY One: Creative, Analytics, or Strategy

A friend recently posted a survey on LinkedIn that asked which of these three factors were most important to succeed in modern marketing: Data Analysis, Creative, or Strategy.

Or as I framed it for someone, take your marketing budget and divide it into four equal parts. Each of the first three areas gets 25% of the budget, but only one of them gets the remaining 25%. Which one do you pick?

Being a creative professional, I said the Creative was the most important. The analysts said Data Analysis, and the strategists said that was dumb and that I was correct.

Just kidding, the strategists said Strategy was the most important.

And of course, there were those predictable few who thought all worked hand-in-hand and they were equally important, and no parent should ever have a favorite child and blah blah blah.

A quick aside

Some people are bad at thought exercises. When you’re presented with one, the goal is to make you weigh the options, consider each one, and then pick the answer you believe is correct. You’re not committed to anything, and no one is going to judge you for your choice.

In a thought exercise, you don’t have the option of whining, “Oh, but they’re all equally important!” And you don’t get to come up with some other option. That’s weasel thinking by someone who couldn’t make a firm commitment if their life depended on it. If it were a real-life decision, I could see the importance of trying to find an equitable solution. But this isn’t that.

The point of a thought exercise is to think and make a choice, and then defend your choice. Ruminate on the results. Consider what would happen because of the choice you made. Try to predict the future based on what you chose.

Don’t be so wishy-washy about your decision. It won’t kill you to commit to an idea for two minutes.

Back to the article

My logic was this:

The Creative element is the most important in the marketing department because if you create mediocre content, a great strategy will only ensure that more people see your polished turd. And data analysis will tell you how many people actually saw it.

Bad or mediocre content won’t convert, it won’t create fans, it won’t move people down the sales funnel. They won’t sign up for your newsletter, they won’t follow you on Twitter and Instagram, and they won’t remember you when it comes time to make a purchase.

So do you really want to improve the number of people who see your content by putting all your money into the strategy element? And do you really want to know, down to the last decimal place, how many people thought your content was awful? Because data analysis has never sold anything, it only tells you what worked and what didn’t. It never tells you what will work, it only tells you what already worked, and then you can infer from the data that you should do it again.

I’ve told the story elsewhere of the data analyst who once got annoyed with me because I wrote about putting vehicle wraps on tournament fishing boats for a client. The client was known for doing vehicle wraps, as well as other commercial signage, and the boat wraps were something one of their franchisees was doing.

The analyst said, “No one has ever come to the website looking for boat wraps! Why would you waste the energy to make that?”

I said, “How much content do we have on boat wraps now?”

“Well, none.”

“That’s why no one has ever come looking for it.”

The following month, our boat wrap article was the second-most visited article on the entire blog, only behind the front page.

During our next meeting, I said, “Did you see this month’s numbers?”

The analyst said, “Yes, I did.”

“Did you see where the boat wraps article ranked?”

*angry silence*

I wrote another boat wrap article the following month and it stayed in the top 10 for a few months. I know, because I asked the analyst about it at each monthly meeting.

The big lesson I learned was that analytics should never, ever drive content, it should only measure what was done. Being a data-driven marketer means you’re a reactive marketer, not proactive. You’ll never try something new because the data hasn’t told you to try it.

For that reason alone, analytics has to be dropped from consideration for the extra 25% of our budget.

Choosing between creative and strategic elements of marketing

This is a tougher choice, and if I made a wishy-washy weasel choice, I would split the remaining 25% of my budget between these two areas. But that’s not possible, so I have to make a choice.

And yes, I will admit that I’m biased as a creative professional myself.

But I also believe that well-done content leads to more engagement than mediocre content. So if I have to choose between getting my work in front of 10,000 people with a 20% engagement or 50,000 people with a 2% engagement, I’ll take the smaller audience with the bigger engagement every time.

I see this a lot with self-published book authors on Twitter. These are the Twitter cheaters who grow their follower count to low six-figures, and then blast out message after message about “Buy my books! Buy my books!”

They don’t engage, they don’t have conversations, they don’t ask or answer questions. They just follow a bunch of people, get them to follow back, and then bombard them with nothing but advertisements.

They do all this work in gaining an audience, and then put out nothing of value or interest. If they at least put in some time and energy and created some interactive content, they’d probably have a lot more customers.

Instead, they focused completely on strategy and didn’t do anything at all for the Creative. Are their books any good? Who knows? Their ads were so bad, I didn’t want to find out. If anything, their content and strategy turned me off of their books.

They got a low six-figure audience, which is a great strategy, but couldn’t do anything with it. It’s like getting a high-powered car and then letting it sit in your driveway because you didn’t put any fuel into it.

So Strategy doesn’t get the remaining 25% either.

Which means Creative is the most important part of your marketing, and it gets the remainder of the budget. Which is what happens when Creative people are in charge of writing their own stories.

Bottom line

Two lessons: First, don’t be afraid of a thought exercise. It’s a survey that no one (except me) is going to remember in 24 hours, and no one will lambast you because of your choice. (Unless you gave a Kumbaya, “Why Can’t We All Get Along” answer, in which case you should be roundly mocked.)

Second, good creative work will do more for your successful marketing than the strategy or analytics ever could.

Put more of your marketing budget into getting good creative work. Come up with the best strategy you can for the money you have. And then look at your analytics and see what’s performing the best. If you’re a small business or have a limited product line, it’s not like you need a Ph.D. data scientist anyway, so don’t spend more than you have to.

What do you think? Where would you put the remaining 25% of your marketing budget? Make a choice, defend your answer, and don’t give me any of this “they’re all equally important” nonsense. Commit and defend!

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The Conundrum of Writing With Integrity

I recently heard Jamal Greene on a recent Two Writers Slinging Yang podcast interview, talking about his time writing at Sports Illustrated.

He talked about writing at Sports Illustrated where the writing became an issue of what the reader wanted. He called it a form of customer service, or “serve to order.”

If the customer wants it, or the editors thought they wanted a certain product, and your job as the writer was to produce that product. And over the time I was at Sports Illustrated, it became more and more oriented towards customer service and that didn’t touch me.

If you’re in it because you like to write in a certain way, and then you’ve got to write in a way that’s going to get eyeballs, you’re not really writing with the kind of integrity that you want. And I felt that and I didn’t think I was ever going to get to the point, for good reason, where I had the kind of autonomy to write in the way I wanted to write

The phrase writing with integrity stopped me in my tracks. I had to pause the podcast and ruminate on that for several minutes.

As content marketers, we don’t get the chance to write with integrity very often. Sure, we like to be ethical and truthful. Despite the stereotype people have of marketers, we do try to operate with honesty and truth. But when do we get to actually write with integrity?

When do we get the chance to be open and transparent — the buzzword among many bloggers in the early-2010s — and share what’s really going on? When do we get the chance to tell a good story because it’s a good story and not just one more entry on our content marketing calendar?

“Today, we need an article about how developers can download our API and use our testing environment.”

Not something that allows for a lot of “writing with integrity.”

The problem is, the same that Greene experienced at Sports Illustrated, is that the integrity articles — the long-form, in-depth articles — are not the most popular ones. They’re the best ones, to be sure. But they don’t get the eyeballs. And that’s what journalism is about these days: getting eyeballs and clicks and visits to move advertising revenue. The long, well-done articles don’t get the traffic, and so they don’t get the attention. They’re the ones that get submitted for awards and for inclusion in anthologies. But they don’t get the same kind of traffic as “10 Reasons Why Your Favorite Team Sucks and 10 Why They’ll Win Their Division.”

It’s this way with business blogs. There are certain articles that get all kinds of traffic, but they’re not always the enjoyable, long-form articles that exercise your writing muscles. Instead, you have to write the kinds of articles where you say, “I got a creative writing degree for this? A damn monkey could write this!”

It’s even harder if you write for a corporation, or if you’re in the B2B world, where being dowdy and rigid is practically the price of admission. Very rarely do I see B2B blog articles that are fun, funny, or interesting. (And the ones I did see were more than likely ones that I wrote.)

Content Marketing With Integrity

But that doesn’t mean you can never do it. There are times that companies should be a little vulnerable and tell some stories that show people your history. Let them learn from your mistakes. Write a piece that talks about how your company nearly folded, and it was only thanks to some last-minute maneuvering that saved everyone. (Trust me, that story will be out there anyway, so you might as well be the one to tell it.)

Tell the story about how your solution didn’t work for a customer right away, and it took some additional work, consulting, and even training to get things to work properly. Don’t skip over that part in your case study, embrace it and showcase it.

Just like sportswriters have to write the daily news stories and game recaps (also called “gamers”) in order to be able to write the long-form features that make sportswriting so interesting, marketers need to carry water on a daily basis, writing the serve-to-order stories before they can write their other, better stories.

Of course, you may be in an industry or work for a business where you don’t get to write with integrity at all. Financial services, lawyers, pharmaceutical companies, and other highly-regulated businesses tend not to be able to write something that risky.

But for the rest of you, stop worrying about stories that will only bring in the eyeballs. Take a risk once in a while on a story that’s not a listicle, or something that promises “X Secrets to Improve Your Productivity.” While I like those articles and think they’re great traffic generators, they’re not very interesting or deep.

If you’re into the content marketing funnel philosophy, keep writing your “top of funnel” articles to bring people in. But try writing with integrity and transparency, and write the article you’ve been itching to write, and use it at the bottom of the funnel where people are about ready to sign.

Take a risk, try something new, and write the story you’ve been feeling, not the story on your content calendar.

Photo credit: Devanath (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Blogging For Your Business Speaker Schedule

I’m part of the Blogging For Your Business seminar series this month, and it’s already well underway. I’m very honored to be a part of such an august group and know several of the names on here.

If you want to learn about how blogging can establish you as an expert in your field, boost your SEO, and stand out from your non-blogging competition, this is a great event for you. You’ll learn from several of the experts in the industry, you can register right here.

And if you register in time to hear my session, I will be giving away a free ebook on 12 (Or More) Steps to Improve Your Writing. (Link coming soon.)

  • Monday, May 3rd – Barry Feldman – Fast-Track Your Content Marketing Plan

    • Monday, May 3rd – Amy Woods – Repurpose Your Content Like Top TV Talk Shows

    Tuesday, May 4th – Debra Eckerling – Goal-Setting Simplified For Your Business Blog Using the D*E*B Method

    Tuesday, May 4th – Jason Falls – Holy Smokes! How to Push the Envelope and Stand Out With Social Content Strategy

    Wednesday, May 5th – Mary Kate Gulick – Cornerstone Content: Your Best, First Content Move to Boost Credibility & Authority

    Wednesday, May 5th – Rebekah Read – The 3-Step Plan to Getting Your Website Shown on Google

    Thursday, May 6th – Vicky Laffey – Never Be Stuck for Content Ideas Again!

    Thursday, May 6th – Jennifer Grayeb – How to Know if Your Marketing Is Working and Exactly What to Do if It’s Not

    Friday, May 7th – Erika Heald – How to Audit and Refresh Your Existing Blog Content

    Friday, May 7th – Ilise Benun – Content Marketing on Steroids

    Saturday, May 8th – Lily Ugbaja – Creating Content That Ranks and Converts

    Sunday, May 9th – Chad Pollitt – How to Attract Over 50K Subscribers in 6 Months

    Monday, May 10th – Urwah Kamran – The Bait: How to Create a Freebie That Turns Your Audience Into Paying Customers

    Monday, May 10th – Christine Marie Pizzuto – The Right Content Mindset

    Tuesday, May 11th – Amanda Webb – How to Attract More Blog Readers Than Ever Before

    Tuesday, May 11th – Chris Craft – The Power of Repurposing Content in Digital Media

    Wednesday, May 12th – Cara Chace – How to Fix Your Pinterest Strategy if It’s Not Working

    Wednesday, May 12th – Erik Deckers – Content Marketing Secrets Learned From the Giants of Fiction< — I WILL ALSO BE DOING A FACEBOOK LIVE Q&A AT 3 PM EDT THAT DAY. (Be sure to join the group early so you can just show up at 3PM

    Thursday, May 13th – Mike Allton – How to Create 10x Content 10x Faster

    Thursday, May 13th – Kelsey Formost – 5 Steps to Start and Grow Your List

    Friday, May 14th – Jessika Phillips – How to Capture Attention, Amplify Your Message, and Keep Them Coming Back for More

    Friday, May 14th – Lisa Sicard – Alternative Social Media Networks: Where Are Your Ideal Customers Hanging Out?

    Saturday, May 15th – Joe Pulizzi – How to Use Content to Accomplish What Few Can Achieve: Build Your Business Into an Empire

    Sunday, May 16th – Ashleigh McGarity – How to Make Must-Read Headlines That Will Attract 438% More Traffic to Your Website

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What is the Ideal Paragraph Length?

What’s the ideal paragraph length? Is there an ideal paragraph length? Are there hard-and-fast rules that govern how long our paragraphs — “grafs,” if you’re cool and/or “in the biz” — or can you just create paragraphs of different lengths willy-nilly, like some damn hippie?

The latest episode of Grammar Girl’s podcast opened with this horrifying story:

A while ago, I saw a comment on Facebook about professors who are teaching college students to make all their paragraphs the same length. The woman wrote, “There are professors at my school who deduct points, sometimes even letter grades, if paragraphs aren’t the same exact length throughout a paper. Because writing should be ‘balanced’ and it can only achieve ‘balance’ if all paragraphs are equal in length.”

Since this is one of the most preposterous things I’ve ever heard, I thought I must have misunderstood, but I asked for clarification and learned that the “uniform paragraph length rule” is so pervasive at this university that one professor uses a ruler to measure physical paragraph length in an introductory English class.

Let me say it right now, upfront.

There is no one ideal paragraph length.

According to Grammar Girl, both the Yahoo! Style Guide and the college handbook A Writer’s Reference (affiliate links) say the ideal paragraph length is between 100 and 200 words. However, “good writers treat this as a suggestion and not a hard and fast rule.”

The problem is, we live in an age of skimmers, not readers. If you’re a content marketer, blogger, or essayist, you don’t have the luxury of getting people to dig into a block of text between 100 and 200 words. Large blocks of text without any white space make our eyes glaze over — at least mine do — and we just zone out and get the early morning stares. A big block of text just looks boring as shit. People ignore long paragraphs because they’re dense, so we should avoid cramming in that many words, of which this is the 100th.

Seriously, that graf is exactly 100 words long.

That one was eight.

And that one was four.

Do you see the difference? Do you feel how much easier it felt to read the short one-sentence paragraphs instead of that 100-word monstrosity?

Like it or not, people don’t read, they skim. They prefer short paragraphs, not long chunks of text. Sure, you can slip them in once in a while, but people tend not to read them. Did you even notice I said “shit” in that 100-word paragraph up there?

Unfortunately, writing teachers tend to give young writers bad advice, which is why there are “rules” about paragraph length.

Just remember, there’s the right way to write, and the school way. And the two are frequently different.

Paragraphs Aren’t a Part of Your System, Man!

Paragraphs can — and should — be varying lengths. If you want to write 200-word paragraphs, go ahead. If you think you can manage several 200-word paragraphs in a row, be my guest. But I’ll bet if you were to do a heat map or readability study of your work, you’d find that very few people are slogging their way through that bog.

There are already several “rules of English” that we can safely ignore. Either they’re obsolete, the language has changed, or they never should have been a rule in the first place.

I’ll admit, I’m not a big fan of some of the changes that are happening to the English language. Like the fact that “literally” now means figuratively. (Seriously, go to Google and enter “define literally!” That irritates me to no end!)

Conversely, some things were incorrect in the first place, and they’re only now being fixed, like the whole “don’t end your sentence with a preposition” thing.

Teaching students that a paragraph must be of a certain length is also terrible teaching. Good writing will have paragraphs of varying length, from a couple hundred words (Yeesh!) to just one word. To teach otherwise is a disservice to your students because many of them will go through life thinking it’s a requirement when at best, it’s a guideline.

And before you tell me, “You have to learn the rules before you break them,” I would say 1) there’s not a real rule about paragraph length, and 2) you can teach people that paragraph lengths vary without blowing their minds.

They can make the leap from not knowing how long a graf is to knowing that it can be different. You don’t have to spend an entire semester teaching them this one rule, only to tell them, “Just kidding!” at some undetermined point in the future.

Bottom line: there’s no ideal paragraph length, and you can make them any size you want.

Seriously.

Photo credit: Qimono (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)