Craft Talk: Keep it short - very, very short!

Here's a great cartoon by Tom Fisburne of Marketoonist commenting on the fact that in 2000, the attention span of the modern consumer was 12 seconds, whereas it is now 8 seconds. For the record, the average attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds!

There is a serious side to this however because if your audience has the social equivalent of ADD (attention deficit disorder) then it also means anyone marketing to such an audience needs to consider using "snackable content."

In other words: breaking up the content into a series of bite-sized messages - which also explains why more and more organisations are turning to media such as Twitter, Vine (6 second videos) and infographics. You can read Tom's full article here 

http://tomfishburne.com/2014/10/attentionspan.html

Turning to the craft of writing, I've heard literary agents say they can evaluate a submitted manuscript from just the opening sentence, never mind the first chapter! Combine this with an increasingly ADD-prone audience and the need to make the opening lines of any story punchy, sharp and capable of immediately grabbing the reader's attention becomes paramount. By the same measure, any author (or poet) giving a public reading also needs to immediately engage with their audience if they are not to 'lose' them.