Janet Clarey via Twitter: try a 100-word post.
Hmmm… Today marks two years of my Whiteboard.
These twelve items each appeared around the 17th of a month:
- Pre-work: training’s answer to New Year resolutions.
- Rental cars do get washed (by their owners).
- Job aids, performance support.
- Hamlet explains training versus performance.
- Blogging as brain backup.
- How people learn (despite how we train teachers).
- Side trip: Mary Black sings “Song for Ireland.”
- Globalization, or, how’s your mom?
- How I got this way.
- Yes, you can blog too much.
- Experts, design, and the up-to-speed trap.
- Getting off paper (in ten short years).
Done.
Nicely done.
The 100 word post was prompted a couple of things: my drafts of columns that have to be exactly 750 words; the 140 character limit on Twitter, and my professor in a dissertation class saying (basically)’anybody can summarize research in 200 pages. Skill is interpreting it in 25-50. There’s a lot to be said of brief, succinct messages. I find myself drifting away from long posts for some reason and suspect others may feel the same way.
I enjoyed re-reading your “How I got this way” post.
100 words is pretty confining for me, so perhaps I cheated with a post full of admittedly self-referential links. Still, as poet Robert Francis said of a sestina, “If you drape thirty-nine iron chains around your arms and shoulders and then do a dance, the whole point of the dance will be to seem light and effortless.”
I drift away from some long posts, too, which is sad considering the average length of mine. But then, sometimes when I’m talking with someone, I interrupt myself.