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Q&A How long is too long for a blog post?

A longer post can work on a blog that usually tends toward shorter posts if you take some care in structuring it. "Here are 20,000 words, plus equations" may send some people to the "back" button ...

posted 9y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T04:42:52Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/19398
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T04:42:52Z (almost 5 years ago)
A longer post can work on a blog that usually tends toward shorter posts _if_ you take some care in structuring it. "Here are 20,000 words, plus equations" may send some people to the "back" button right off, but a five-minute introduction followed by an expansion can satisfy both audiences -- those looking for the high-level information and those interested in all the details. The former will stop reading at the first subheading but will have gotten a regular blog post's worth of content out of it, so they should still feel satisfied. (It's probably what they expected when they clicked.) I have no research data to back this up, however.

If taking this approach, it's important to be using a blog platform that doesn't force readers to scroll through the whole post to get to the next one. Medium (where the blog you linked is hosted) shows only the first few sentences of a post on the main page and readers have to click through, so that works. Platforms like LiveJournal and Dreamwidth offer authors the "cut tag" to put content behind a click.

The other option is to break it into multiple posts. This works well if you're covering a topic that has multiple facets or can be treated as a series. You can't always break a long essay into several shorter ones, though, especially if you'll be spreading them out in time. If the later parts deeply depend on the former ones, then anybody who didn't read or doesn't remember the earlier ones is going to be lost and probably give up anyway. If the parts are more independent, though, consider breaking them up to fit the blog's usual format.

Finally, if the blog is new and doesn't yet _have_ a long tradition, there is more room for variation. Maybe the blog's readers are happy to have longer posts but there just haven't been any yet.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2015-10-19T16:33:16Z (about 9 years ago)
Original score: 5