The Writing Lesson a Friend Taught Me (and He's Not a Writer)

28 Sep 2025 #writing

After maybe a month, I caught up with an old friend and got a surprise critique.

The first thing he told me was, “I had some time without checking LinkedIn. I found one of your posts, but it was too long and I stopped reading midway.” We both laughed. Ouch!

When my friend said that, I realized I do the same thing. I skip big blocks of text on LinkedIn and blog posts.

Truth is, people scroll social media for dopamine, not for depth. And we should write for them, too. We should use attention-grabbing opening lines and short, well-formatted posts.

Graffiti, social media posts, essays, book chapters…They’re all different. Readers come with different goals. The platform sets its own rules and expectations. Our job is to write in a way that fits.