What writers & others say
“We are the generation capable of doing many things at once, without enjoying any of them.”
— Dinesh Kumar Biran, entrepreneur
“Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle. That’s the intellectual environment of the Internet.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
“The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
“Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of thought we’re involved in, the greater the impairment the distractions cause.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
“We have cast our lot with the juggler.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
The web “turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
“Multitasking is the ability to screw everything up simultaneously.”
— Jeremy Clarkson, English broadcaster, journalist, farmer, game show host and writer
The web is “training our brains to pay attention to crap.”
— Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco
Online multitasking makes us “suckers for irrelevancy.”
— Clifford Nash, a Sanford University professor who’s studied the effects of multitasking
“Being effective at social media, whether for business or personal use, means capturing people who have short attention spans. They’re only a click away from a picture of a funny cat, so you have to make your thing more compelling than that cat. And that can be a high bar.”
— Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder and executive chairman
“The average attention span of the modern human being is about half as long as whatever you’re trying to tell them.”
— Meg Rosoff, award-winning author
“I don’t know how to read any more. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it.”
— Gary Shteyngart, author, Super Sad True Love Story
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Would your piece be twice as good if it were half as long? Yes, say readability experts.
So how long should your message be? Your paragraphs? Your sentences? Your words? What reading ease level should you hit?
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