Make it Quick - In 115 Characters or Less

Last night I had an interesting phone call from my oldest daughter (age 30). She suggested that if I wanted to attract the attention of her generation to my fundraiser for Sandra and Matthew (www.giveforward.org/matthew/), I'm going to need to cut the message back to 115 characters or less because, after all, they are the Facebookers, Twitterers, texters and so on of the social media world and they don't have time to read long texts. I agreed, partly, because I know I tend to be long-winded when I talk and overly-inked when I write. I also partly agreed because she has a fairly recent degree in business administration and I figured she must be on top of the communications trends for her generation. But, I argued, I'm a traditionalist trying to adapt to this digital pace in life and it's going to take me a little extra time to be brief. We both giggled in revelry as our generation gap seemed to open and close and open again. Finally, she respected my dilemna and suggested maybe I should bullet-point the facts at the beginning of the fundraising letter and leave the rest for anyone who has time to keep reading on. Fair enough, I'll work on it. In the meantime, I thought it was interesting when I received her weekly e-mail update with photos of the grandkids this morning and noticed it was three paragraphs long! I couldn't help myself, I decided to make my response a quick read, in 115 characters or less:

"thx 4-px! lv m! M"

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Some data for those who
are still reading this post:

It's been since 2006 that a report has been issued on reading trends in the U.S. My guess is, a current report would indicate even less time is spent reading.

In contrast, I thought it was interesting to see the 2006 data on writing abilities of high school graduates and college graduates entering the work force: