Regarding length of posts and the reading thereof, with or without LJ cuts:
Regardless of the type of writing or subject matter, people read a short bit of whatever it is and decide then whether they're interested enough to read further. This short bit varies from person to person, but these days is usually somewhere less than about three normal-sized paragraphs. It also varies based on type of writing, as you noted, *but even so if the first couple of sentences don't interest someone, and the first paragraph or two don't build on that interest, regardless of the type of writing people don't read it* Granted, people can and often do stop reading much later in a longer piece; but if you haven't caught their attention and interest at least minimally in what you have to say, whether it's an essay or personal information or a story or whatever, they're not going to make it past the first paragraph or two. If you want people to read your stuff, if you want to attract readers, this is something you need to keep in mind no matter what kind of writing you're doing or what forum you are sharing it in, online or other. This is true regardless of whether or not there is an LJ-cut. As to fiction posts, I don't know if I've ever seen a piece of fanfic longer than a drabble (ultra-short fic, usually somewhere around 100 words) that wasn't cut. And usually even drabbles are cut. This is a standard convention of fandom on LJ, and even people who are notoriously bad about not cutting personal stuff follow it. (Fannish people on LJ are often drawn solely by the fannish community there, and have been lurking a while before starting their own LJ and posting, particularly before posting fanfic, so they generally know what the conventions are before they make their first post.) So for the fic community any auto-cut would be kind of a moot point. I am not coming in on any side of this argument or discussion. I think both sides have valid points as to the social aspects of this, and don't know enough about coding to discuss the technical aspects. > On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 2:23 PM, Azalais Aranxta <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Thu, 16 Apr 2009, Rachel Lee Cherry wrote: >> >> The writer of the post is already, by posting it on a journalling >> service and not a blogging service, giving me the option of >> reading it in any colour, shape, form I care to, with or without >> images. Why is giving me the option to say that only the first >> 3, or 5, or 10 paragraphs will appear on my reading page (which >> is mine, not part of their journal), and I can then click the >> link to get to the rest, any worse than giving me the option to >> read it in pink text on a yellow background if I feel like it? >> I don't get this. > > > Because it changes what I (as a writer of nonfiction posts) might put in > those first few paragraphs. It'd change my writing style to a more > newspaper-y format, forcing me to write a lede for any long posts so that > readers know what lies beyond the cut. And I'd expect few readers, > especially those who've never read my writing before, to click a cut with > mysterious contents. > > Just like paragraphing and the use of asterisks rather than bold > formatting > (or the <b> tag vs. the <strong> tag), it's one more thing I have to keep > in > mind when writing a post. > > And I imagine it'd give fiction writers even *less* space in which to draw > readers into the story. They would have to tweak the story to put juicy > bits > up front, with a certan hard limit of where "up front" is, rather than > placing a cut at a natural break in the story -- or in the case of short > stories, chopping them up strangely and breaking the flow. _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
