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Book a DemoWriting an Online Biography, What Would Abe Lincoln Do?
September 17, 2015 - by Robert Carter
Abraham Lincoln knew the importance of brevity in getting his point across. The Gettysburg Address contains 272 words, and was delivered in less than three minutes. And that was back in the 1860s, when people’s attention spans weren’t fried by Twitter, Facebook and BuzzFeed. If Honest Abe was around today, perhaps he would take to Twitter to lay down his self evident truths, the address runs to about 1400 characters, so he could do it in only 10 tweets! Like any Twitter master, he painstakingly crafted the address, agonizing over every word for days before the speech.
You need to be just as concerned about length when making your online biography. Did you know that 55% of the visitors to your site will only spend 15 seconds reading your biography? They can be expected to maybe read 18% of the words on it; so you had better make sure they that that 18% is dynamite!
Unfortunately for all of you with thousand word biographies adorning your blogs and personal websites, you’re going to have to cut out some things. That is if you want your visitors to retain the information. One of ExpertFile’s most prestigious members, Dr. Tak Mak at UHN has published over three hundred academic articles and has a chest of medals that would put Usain Bolt to shame. But his biography is a very, very small cross section of his total output (in fact it’s only 150 words!). Consider the online biography as a “Best of” album, rather than the complete discography. Your CV or resume is the place where all that lovely stuff belongs, and of course putting that on your website is a great idea to attract visitors who want the full picture.
Barack Obama’s biography on the White House website is only 340 words, and I think that most of us can’t quite put our achievements on quite the same level as the 44th president. President Obama has learned the lesson of Abraham Lincoln; it’s time for us all to prune the fluff of our biographies.