Long articles aren't necessarily good articles

I've been writing articles for almost a year now, and if there's something I learned from all this is that every time a writer starts writing, he has to make a choice - either keep his/her writing fairly short, focus on what he or she has to say and share that work with others, or write articles so long they could be considered books.

And while a lot of people love to think that huge articles are amazing and offer a lot of great information, that's not always the case.

Here's a small example - I could write an article that will probably have over 5000 words about Linux. I used it for a while a few years ago and I still remember how to do a bunch of stuff. I could tell you why it's an amazing alternative to Windows, how it works in a lot of situations and how to install stuff.

Will that article be useful? Will it help someone?

Probably not. The main reason for that is that I don't really know what I'm talking about. It's been a long time since I used Linux, and when I was using it, I wasn't doing anything special. It was just me using an operating system that wasn't Windows. Nothing else.

However, I can write huge articles, talking about the same thing in 3 or 4 sentences without having any intention of sharing something really useful with you.

There are a lot of people out there who can do the same thing I can do, but who actually do it. They take everything they think they know and they put it into huge articles that say pretty much nothing.

They just include a bunch of words, approaching topics they don't master, hoping to get your attention and to brag about how hard they work and how important what they do is, because they're so smart they can easily write over 5000 words without even getting tired.

Here's the thing - everyone can put words on paper (or, for those writing digitally, on a document). It's easy. You just read a few books, learn a lot of words and then write about something random.

Writing a good article however, that's different. It takes some experience. You don't need to explain a simple thing in hundreds of words. You can use a few dozens and be done with it. You can even use four or five.

As long as you share your thoughts or ideas with people without writing too much just for the sake of doing it, it's okay. Learn how to make the difference between writing long articles because you have something to say and keeping in short when needed.