When you go out of your way to make every blog post "tight" with short sentences, white space, and bullets and lists (you know like a good blogger 👼 ), how do you deal with feedback like this?

I had the pleasure of editing your submission—which was a great read! You'll notice I tightened up the copy by turning those short sentences into meatier paragraphs—which our audience love. Please keep this in mind for future articles. Once approved, I'll schedule this in our system.

I'd ask (out of genuine curiosity) how they figured out that their audience loves meatier paragraphs.

I did exactly this.

It is a style question. I personally think varying your sentence choice is the best strategy for an engaging and readable text. But that's my style! Internet friendly short sentences tend not to work as well with sophisticated c suite audiences who want more complexity in their content. Companies who have those personas are the companies I see likely to love longer paragraphs.

I don't think there's a correlation between sophisticated and meaty paragraphs?

I agree in principle. However, in practice, I've written and edited work by developers focused on highly technical content for other developers and for a consultancy where their content is aimed at CTOs and is about about really complex IT strategy things. Both fields tend to have too much complexity to support consistently short sentences. For example, just to discuss a data strategy capabilities issue I have to list five things that are part of those capabilities in a sentence. If I am writing about how to develop those capabilities then that sentence is going to be long. There is no way to shorten it. And the SME insists I writes all five. That client also liked long paragraphs and I’ve done a competitive analysis and all their competitors write similarly. It's sector wide.

In your example, I think five bullets would have looked more presentable and easier to read, no? I get the sector thing- but this is my sector and I'm certain their clinging onto old habits from a print journalism background.

No. They would not have worked at all. It was a sentence with a clear argument. Nor would bullets have worked for the reader. It's not a scanning persons. It's a persona that enjoys white papers and thought leadership that does a deep dove.

I don't think we can label all CTOs as a persona. That's very 1990s.

We actually write to CTOs in specific industries. And this work is with consultants who are also basically sales people and who know what their clients like as they spend a lot of time with them.

I actually asked some of their readers what they prefer:

ah yes, the famous "tight and meaty" approach -- like a stringy overcooked stringy piece of beef haha

woof, @green-dawn-16941. Did you ever find out why they think their readers prefer a different style?