Read Slowly

 

This week's Newsweek had an article about reading slower as a metaphor for slowing down the pace of your day. Which brings me to my grumpiest complaint about magazine writers- they use three pages of tiny print to say what could be well-explained in three paragraphs of large, widely spaced words. Of course, in fashion magazines that format works well because most of the space between words is filled with advertisements.

But I'm talking about information magazines. They are written like freshman essays; Take a basic idea and stretch it out to two thousand words. No make that three thousand words so the editor can cut something to justify his job.

I know weekly news magazines have space to fill whether they have writers who understand current events or not. I want to know what is going on in the world so I race through the articles to scan the tidbits of information then rest my eyes on a slick, carefully produced advertisement.

I told you this makes me grumpy. Sometimes I think I should only write blogs when I have something jolly and interesting to say, but my friends like to hear from me more often than that. But that doesn't mean I need to take two thousand words to say what I'm not thinking.

Nancy Sherer

 

 


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