The catastrophe of The Age of the Sentence (plus, what this means and why you should care)

This may seem like a weird newsletter post to send out, and if that's how you're feeling, you’re in good company. 

I feel a little weird writing it. I mean. . . who writes something about the impact of our sentence length and then expects anyone to read it???? 

But I think there’s a nuance here, a necessary splitting of hairs that’s needed (now, maybe more than ever) as we think about how we think and how we share those thinks*. 

Sometime in recent history, a marketer showed up in someone’s inbox with a marvelous plan. 

Because she knew that attention spans have become catastrophically shorter (proof here), and because she very smartly hunched that most people on her email list were opening and reading on their mobile devices, she decided to change the way she wrote. Without knowing it, she ushered in the Age of the Sentence, believing that our brains and hearts can only handle coherency one sentence at a time. 

Like bad marketing often does, her experiment morphed into a best practice, and every marketer who wanted to be any kind of marketer quickly followed suit. Emails, blog posts, even social media – it all got shorter and shorter and shorter, to the point that when you put your ear up to the glass and listen to the words in print, we all sound a bit like our ancient ancestors who haven’t quite learned the power of conversation >>>>>

Ancestor #1: You? fire? 

Ancestor #2: nods silently in agreement 

The thing about language – shortened – is that there’s a remnant of believers out there who believe that language is spiritual. 

And I don’t mean meet me at church on Sunday spiritual.

Language is the part of us that makes us fully human. It lives in our souls and finds shape and form in our minds, and it’s the tool, the gift, the miracle that allows us to build community, to make friends, to innovate, to ideate, to instigate all levels of good and evil. 

But when you tune into the trends, it's just hard to argue what's so blatantly obvious: language is getting shorter. It’s de-evolving and re-embedding into our lizard brains – the earliest, most prehistoric brain we’ve got.** And it’s caused us to surrender ourselves (and our language) to a reactionary and oft-very-ugly fight to survive. 

Ruled by fear. Guided by emotion. Justified by fight-or-flight. It’s almost as if we’re becoming a people who have chosen to retreat to Plato's cave and pretend that the pixeled one-dimensional shadows on the wall are the only realities we ever really needed in the first place. 

And here's why that's so very dangerous: Language is the thing that connects us, that pulls our minds into one another’s worlds and invites us to see in new, unimagined ways. It’s the iron that sharpens iron, the forge that turns us into something whole and meaningful, the footnote that invites you to rethink the frames you’ve used to build your closely guarded world. 

Language exists to stop us in our tracks – to push us back and demand that we think harder, pause longer. Hovering somewhere between the divine and the human, language showed up to expand the complexities of humanity – so that we might marvel at those complexities and then join together to simplify and beautify all of it. And when we shorten it or turn it into a machine that’s easily scrolled and easily marketed – we rob it of its obligation.

The aim, then, shouldn’t be fast and furious, short and punchy, edgy and viral – should it? 

Not, at least, if we are serious about becoming a people who understand what it takes to chisel out the best parts of our humanity. 

*Yes, I know this isn’t a real word.

**Absolutely not. I am not a linguistic scientist. This is a metaphorical analysis. 

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I'm Lindsay Hotmire, founder of Storyhouse Fifteen, a brand storytelling studio that uses the best of intuition, science, and strategy to help small business owners, coaches, and consultants build bold brands and tell great stories (without sacrificing the convictions in their hearts). Learn more at storyhousefifteen.com.