Are you caught in the “too long, didn’t read” trap?

If you’ve been on the internet, you’ve read this little abbreviation: tl;dr. If you’re new to the internet (welcome! It’s awful here.) tl;dr stands for too long; didn’t read.

It’s a standard snarky reply to “wall of text” forum or Reddit posts, rambling blogs – even extended Tweets (or Exes… definitely sounds like something you don’t want.)

The writer types are surely scoffing: are people really this lazy? Or are we drowning in deluges of words and other content – the shiny flashy stuff that leaves words wanting – that we simply don’t have time to waste on something that could be *gasp* boring?

In business, we know that time is money. Boring can be forgiven; being irrelevant is worse.

New research by Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile, writing in TIME, suggests that the average reader who clicks on your page will spend fewer than 15 seconds on it, even if your goal is to have them read the entire thing.

As a devourer of novels, articles, scripts, plays, and blogs, I even get turned off by longer-than-necessary content. I’m sure we’ve all scrolled through an online recipe, chronicling how the author would mill under Nonna’s feet while she’d lovingly slice tomatoes as Nonno waved through the window, watering the concrete under a blazing summer sun, a rich legacy of building a prosperous life in a new country blah blah blah just give me the ingredients and the method already. (Thankfully, some websites have a handy “skip to the recipe” button or you can use apps where they don’t.)

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: academia ruins good writing. Academia sets arbitrary word counts so students may progress, ingraining a sense that “more is better.” In reality, conveying your point in as few words as possible not only means it’s economical for the reader but is better understood by more people.

Now where can this mentality run amok without any time constraints? You guessed it – by using Generative AI.

Large Language Models can blink content into life: that 2,000-word essay about cardboard will now take four seconds to write instead of four hours.

Even so, who wants to read that?

“Generative AI produces text astonishingly quickly… it’s mesmerising viewing!” says Vivienne Pearson, freelance writer, and creator of Opinion Writing, a course that helps get well-crafted opinions out into the world.

“So, it’s super easy to ask for a longer word count. Surely 2,000 words on a topic is better than 200, right? But not if those 2,000 words are boring, bloated, or blighted with errors.” Tedium aside, those AI mistakes can be costly. They’re rising as high as 60% as AI runs out of “new data” and trains on its own erroneous outputs.

Last month, big four accounting firm Deloitte had to partially refund the Australian government for an advisory report that contained inaccurate portions “written” by AI. An discerning eyeball across it might have helped.

“Professional writers know that being forced to self-edit to a shorter word count is often where the magic lies,” Vivienne says. “Self-editing is hard intellectual work, but it forces clarity, succinctness, and directness, all of which are writing gold.”

Joel Saltzman, author of If You Can Talk, You Can Write calls this the “crap, crap, crap, crap, GOLD!” method – writing until you hit something worthy and discarding the rest. In the age of the web, there’s no such thing as a word count; but that doesn’t mean you should abuse your readers with it.

AI: It’s never going away

We’ve all felt the tide turning against mediocre, AI generated slop. Why do some people keep pushing it?

This could be the result of a widespread Dunning-Kruger effect; a tendency for people with a little competency at a given task overestimating their abilities. I personally can’t even draw stick figures; but a Midjourney account and some slick prompting wouldn’t (and won’t ever) turn me into a Rembrandt overnight. Perhaps some people adopt a “have ChatGPT, will prompt” mindset which makes them Hemingway (it’s actually the opposite.)

Technical writer Fiona McNeill says we need formal education around prompting for clear writing. “If people could learn to write prompts like ‘write 400 words on [this topic] for [this audience] in Plain Australian English’, we might see some quality AI-generated content.

I mean, it’ll probably be wrong because AI doesn’t know, for example, roosters don’t lay eggs. But it’ll be nicely written wrongness, which puts it on par with 76% of everything else written on the Internet.”

Of course, we can’t all be old men (and women) yelling at clouds hoping AI goes away. Writers are using AI tools more and more if they’re genuinely useful. However, if one is to actually attempt the craft of writing, we should get better through practice, not reliant on programmed output. Recognising good writing through wide and deep reading is also crucial. Handing over bloated copy requiring wholesale slashing and burning is at cross purposes with the intent of AI: to free up time for leisure, not create more work.

Freelance health and medical writer Sophie Auld explains the absurdity of it all by way of a meme: “I recently saw a meme that had a person at a desk on one side saying ‘look, I used AI to write this comprehensive, detailed report’ to a colleague. On the other side was another person at a desk saying ‘look, I used AI to summarise this long-winded waffle into a single page’ to their colleague.

“It summed it up perfectly.”

Enough said.

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