How To Write Short Texts: 3 Tips on Narrative Dynamics and Style

There are long texts, and there are short texts. In our current digital reality, there are also very short texts. Regardless of length, a text that is meaningful and successful is more than a sum of its parts, that is, its words. If that weren’t true, a massive historical novel spanning three volumes would always have been preferable to a short story of a few thousand words.

In fact, however, there is no qualitative difference based solely on the length of a work. An op-ed, when written with skill, can have much wider repercussions than a nonfiction book dealing with a similar issue. But although the above might appear self-evident, the question remains:

Why are some short texts so meaningful and successful?

7 Interesting Greek Words and How to Use Them in Your Writing

If a native English speaker was asked to name seven Greek words, “It’s all Greek to me” would perhaps be a tongue-in-cheek response. And yet the English language is replete with loanwords—that is, words adopted from another language with little to no modification—from Greek.

Perhaps the man who most famously demonstrated this was Xenophon Zolotas, a Greek economist known for his two speeches at the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in the late 1950s. As the story goes, Zolotas spoke in Greek, yet he was understood by his English-speaking audience.Continue reading

A Case Against Having a Daily Writing Quota

In online discussions with other writers, the “big Q” question sooner or later pops up: “What’s your daily writing quota?”

Well, let’s get that out of the way immediately, so that we can focus on the how’s and why’s, which are more important: I don’t have a daily writing quota—that is, a daily word-count goal.

Some days (albeit rarely) I write 5,000 words. Some days I write 50 words. There can be days or weeks with 0 words.

But I always get the job done and, more importantly, I like the result.

So, let me proudly declare it right away: I am vehemently against daily writing quotas, and I believe writers do not help themselves by obeying a daily writing quota.

That statement by itself is useless without some elaboration, so perhaps it’s more fruitful to explain why I don’t believe in such self-imposed goals and, more crucially, what there is to gain from not having a daily writing quota.

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