Adventures in Medium

Medium Pieces Are Getting Too Long !

Get a grip — short is back!

A few months ago, people were banging on about how Medium pieces were getting shorter and shorter.

Writers, no longer content to write for the love of the art, were resorting to tabloid-style brevity in order to maximise earnings.

They were going for the short-game. Playing tiddlywinks when they should have been playing chess.

It was getting out of hand, so many advocated bringing back the long form. Get writing back to where it was before we started writing on here. That beautiful time when you wrote without the need to cram everything you’ve ever learned into 2 minutes.

So this is what people did.

But missed the point.

Instead of writing long, meaningful essays, they simply strung out their pieces by filling them with froth. Filled them with candy floss, like a butcher fills his sausages with sawdust instead of meat.

Pieces were longer and fatter, but the taste was the same. Even the titles and subtitles got longer. With some taking up an entire page before they got to the prose.

It made reading more like a death sentence than a pleasure, and I would have been happier to see pieces like

How to Kill Yourself in 10 Easy Steps

I’d have read that!

Therefore, in a total policy reversal, Medium is now advocating shorter pieces.

But not just 2–3 minute pieces.

We’re talking short here. Thirty-second max. Twenty-second, even better. Ten-second, a winner!

Enough time for you to say ABSOLUTELY nothing! Just a title. Then straight to the prose.

I write about Travel, Food and Mental Health.

That’s enough!

Brevity is the new watchword here. And if you don’t know what that means, it means don’t write more than a sentence. And if that seems too long, stick to a phrase:

I write about Canva

That’s all we need to know. Four words, then shut up. You never know, your piece might even get Boosted.

Thanks for being short. For more Medium advice, see