There was this chap in school, a friend possibly, who one day, to my amazement, explained to me the secret to his success.
You see this chap, a friend possibly, used to get straight As in everything.
Everything included English, history and geography. He used to outscore me even though I pretty much wrote the same stuff. He was bright, we both were.
I read a couple of his essays and all I saw was a sea of tedious words.
I kept staring at his long essays that had a lot of words and a lot words that never seemed to be going anywhere. It was like he was just repeating himself. Really boring the way he just repeated himself. It made me yawn trying to read his incredibly long essays. They just never got to point.
One day I asked him and he said:
"What you need to do is keep repeating the same stuff but in different ways and go round and round over-explaining and stretching it. They won't notice what you're doing - they love it. You need fat paragraphs. You'll look like you know what you're talking about and it will look good on the word count."
I tried it and he was right - my Cs turned to As - it was magic. All I had to do was take my sweet time and explain everything again and again. And once I explained it in one paragraph use slightly different wording and explain the same thing again later on, twisting, turning, refusing to meet the answer straight on.
It turned out that the teachers and examiners really didn't like you to get to the point. They liked a two thousand word essay with a fifty word message instead.
This chap, a friend possibly, was right about everything.
Look around - how long does it take for content creators to get to the point?
Click bait titles followed by articles or videos that are far longer than they should be. Articles or videos that force you to put up with them until you finally get to something that's buried underneath all the repetition and formulaic tricks.
This chap, a friend possibly, was a genius, naturally comprehending the secret to creating popular content.
I can't for the life of me remember his name though.
