Three-hundred words isn’t enough for anything.
Maybe an epitaph, a song, or a simple recipe.
Word count, of course, is necessary when it comes to fitting on a printed page but here in digital land it’s become more a question of attention span.
Three-hundred words is basically a text TikTok.
Tik-Tok, you’ll remember, was the clockwork robot who befriended Dorothy Gale in Return to Oz (1985). That film terrified me as a child. Remember the evil queen who could wear different heads?
What was I saying? Attention spans. Right.
TikTok is destroying the minds of America’s youth. Perhaps that’s why the actress who played Dorothy, Fairuza Balk, ended up a Nazi.
She played Edward Norton’s girlfriend in American History X (1998).
Speaking of Nazis, I read on Twitter that it’s Chinese algorithms giving them all #GayDHD and that’s why Elon Musk is upping the character limit to 4000.
If you’ve only recently discovered that Musk is a buffoon then you really need to pay more attention.
Maybe get off TikTok, Zoomer.
If we speak at a rate of 125 to 150 words per minute, and TikTok has an optimal recommended video length of between 21 and 34 seconds, that gives us two TikToks a minute. So, okay, 300 words is four wordy TikToks.
It’s ironic being limited to 300 words for an assessment set in a classroom that has two large flatscreen monitors distracting us with adverts.
Yes. £9,250 per year and they still show us ads.
How will a story stick in our consciousness these days if we don’t watch it over and over again on VHS? We might as well be taking off our heads like Queen Mombi.
As I’ve shown, writing 3000 words about anything is easy. Editing that down to 300 is the real show of
CHRIS PARLETT 
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