The pressure to keep content visually appealing and ready for impulse readers is a constant suppressant on length, regardless of what is cut to make it happen. In a University of Kentucky study of blogs about cancer, researchers found that a full 80 percent of the blog posts they analyzed contained fewer than five hundred words.3 The average number of words per post was 335, short enough to make the articles on the Huffington Post seem like lengthy manuscripts. I don’t care what Nick Denton says; I’m pretty sure that the complexities of cancer can’t be properly expressed in 100 words. Or 200,
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