My Last Superpower

I was a bit concerned when I scrolled through my blog a few weeks ago and realised that the average length of my posts was about 200 words. Such brevity is very unusual for me. It may be enough to make a point, but it’s certainly not enough to be particularly articulate.   

I wondered if I was unconsciously responding to the fact that most people have short attention spans (thank you for that, Google) or if I was unable to elucidate my own ideas. Worse still, what if 200 words were all I ever really had to say about anything? I'm not suggesting that ranting is good writing, but my rationale for disliking Twitter is that it doesn’t allow you to say much that makes sense because the word limit is crippling. All that nose-in-the-air-ing breaks down if I voluntarily operate within a word limit, even if it's self-prescribed. 

It’s quite intriguing that being concise has suddenly become important. If nobody likes reading or listening for very long and the average person, in general, favours succinctness, why did the world ever have such long articles, essays and books in the past? Perhaps the speaker/author’s conceit allowed them to get carried away. Or maybe preferences do change. Were the lengthy speeches of yore social constructs – unnecessary chatter to sustain social gatherings before alcohol and dancing were invented? Or has our grasp of language improved so tremendously in such a short span of time as to allow us to communicate so much by saying so little?

Well, I’m glad to say, I don’t care. The length of the last couple of posts has allayed my fears. I’ve still got it!

I’m also proud to say that I’ve stopped caring a terrible lot about grammatical perfection. It’s very liberating. Exams give me a lot of time to think about nothing and that brings so many ideas all at once that I have to scribble them down quickly, sometimes even before they are fully formed in my head. Have you ever had an idea and forgotten it? You feel like you lost the one spark of brilliance that could have changed your life forever. You progressively inflate its importance and genius until you remember that it was something stupid like having eggs for breakfast. It’s times like these when you wish you had just forgotten it altogether, so that you could continue feeling like you could have ruled the universe had fate not promptly snatched the opportunity. 

But to return to my original point, when I went back to read the scribbles, I realised they were not bad. Sure, there are errors. But just as researchers should not give precedence to method over matter, I, too, have learnt to stop prioritising language over content. It really is the thought that counts.