Recently a person commented anonymously on my blog that he/she (or transgender maybe) never reads any article of mine but is "just happy to see your name on them". I don’t quite understand what is meant by that.
And the “foe” fell on my “rihey fai” just a few days later, when, for the first time in my life, a friend said that my sentences are too long, and therefore, he (yeah, definitely not transgender this time) can't understand what I am trying to say, and that therefore, he doesn't know how to reply to my messages.
That solved the mystery of him not addressing a lot of queries I ask of him in my text messages - or the fact that he seems not to bother about continuing a nice chat and will, instead, answer my messages with just one- or two-sentence replies, leaving the rest of the “issues” I raise in my messages unanswered. Of course, I don’t complain because there could be a lot of reasons that I don’t understand behind his decision not to engage in long, drawn-out conversations with me.
I guess this is understandable because he is in a top job at a television station in Maldives, and therefore, his area of expertise is "sound bites", which are short sentences edited to align with the jump cuts and edits in the videos of their programs.
Some people would say this is a sign of our times which indicate that human attention span has shortened.
In the wake of this, I thought of getting rid of "conjoining" words that "combine" one or more sentences with words like "and", "but", etc., which result in my use of long writings that would put British novelist Jane Austen to shame. Yes, I was able to read her “Pride and Prejudice” only once, because her sentences were more like paragraphs, where, upon reaching the end of the “paragraph” which are actually "sentences", I would have already forgotten what she had said in the beginning of her “sentence-cum-paragraph”. Hence, I had to settle for only watching the countless movie versions, my favorite been the Keira Knightley version as I like ogling her. Just kidding.
I am thinking of experimenting with just single sentences to see how this effects the understanding of my articles. I hope it doesn’t sound too odd.
For example:
"Ali woke up at 4.30 am. He brushed his teeth. He splashed water on his face. He did the ablution. He prayed Fathis Namaadhu. He went to Aiybalhey Kada. He ate a gulha. He drank a kalhu sai. He went on a walk around Male'. It was his daily exercise to lower his cholesterol levels. He returned home. He went into the toilet. He *censored*. He didn't want any *censored* to occur when he saw his pretty female staff at his office. He showered. He dried his hair and body. He put on gel, lotion, eye-liner, and anti-dry lip balm. He put on his office clothes. He went to his office on his Pulsar mobike. Blah blah blah...".
OMG (read: Oh My God), this looks exactly like the daily tweets from a certain The Democrats’ activist we all know and need no further identification but I will not mention his name because he could file a defamation lawsuit against me.
Or perhaps, this single-sentence structure, resembles the prose used by authors who write books for children!
Anyway, I don't know how to apply economy of words. My thoughts are too long to be written shortly for platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.
I mean, I have so many things to say. So, I am like India’s British Booker Prize winning author Salman Rushdie who seems to have a flair for playing around with words. My writings are lengthy because I want my "message" to be clear and not misunderstood. So I don't know why this TV station friend said he can't understand my writings. He is very good in English. He gave me the book on Taliban. He read Prince Harry's biography and said it's not good. He reads novels of award winning writers like Turkey's author Elif Shafak.
Why I am not on Twitter anymore is because not anything to do with its 4,000 character limit but because I don't like the hot "zuvaabu" among politically charged Dhivehin on it which I find to be very toxic to my mental health. I am on Threads because for the moment there is no online fighting there yet, but if it becomes like Twitter in future, I will leave it. So, so far I use Threads just to post links to my articles on my blog.
I don't post anything now directly on my Facebook (yeah, that same account called “Dhovi Kaleyge” or “Kaleyge Dhovi” which gets mixed up because Westerners have a certain preference for surnames) except my Instagram posts which automatically get shared on that FB page as I have changed my settings to do that.
Don’t visit my “Hasindu Kalpitiya” FB page because someone (or someones) have hacked and hijacked that account, and anything posted there may be to make my life miserable.
As for my “Dhovi Kaleyge” FB page, except for those Instagram posts on the Wall, I don't post anything more because I don’t want to promote it anymore, as there are many "friends" on it I don't like anymore. And for some reason, maybe to get more freelance work by widening my people-to-people network, like my LinkedIn account, I mistakenly started accepting “Friend requests” from total strangers, mostly Bangladeshis. So I now just allow my FB to "share" my Instagram posts only.
A friend told me to limit my Instagram posts to the 2,200 character limit. He said because Instagram doesn't allow users to click and go to external links, they wouldn't bother to check the remaining part of my articles by making an effort to intentionally visit my blog. But I told him that I am not concerned about the people who have short attention span and are not bothered to visit my blog to read my full articles; that, I only care about people who want to read what I have to say in full.
So, because I am not on Twitter and don't bother much about my Facebook, I use Instagram and Threads in the manner of tweeting and threading. That is, bringing my followers' attention to any blogposts I upload.
I use Instagram because a Maldivian friend told me that most everybody nowadays pay more attention to their Instagram accounts.
Hence, just because some people don't understand the way I use English and Dhivehi, I will not change my writing pattern because the majority of my readers understand my writings. This is the advice I received from a Maldivian visual media creator.
It was only that anonymous commentator and that TV station friend who said they don't understand my writings. I guess I can't devote my time and energy just to cater to only 2 people when the rest of the other people are okay with my writing style.
Thus, my "audience" are those who want to read my thoughts in the way I write. So they will visit my blog to read my articles that I write in the manner I do even now.
Therefore, I should not be concerned when people who are not interested in my writings don't visit my blog. Or my Instagram.
Because of all the genres and variations, I should be concerned about the readers who are my loyal audience.
For example, US author Stephen King covers a wide range of themes, most popular being the horror genre. I don't read his horror stories because horror is not my taste. His horror fans read his horror stuff. I read only his "realism" themes such as "The Shawshank Redemption" which was really good and I think deserved all those Oscar nominations for its movie version.
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