Six is a Popular Number

We’re not sure what this means (though if the editors of SMITH magazine are reading this, we’d still love those Planet Earth DVDs…), but Jarred’s entry in TreeHugger/SMITH Magazine’s six-word essay contest on “The Green Life” is currently featured prominently on the contest’s site. In case you missed these in the comments of my previous post:

Jarred: Kermit’s Right, Being Green Ain’t Easy.

Taylor: Don’t act in isolation; isolate inaction.

While it’s too late to enter the contest, I wanted to highlight this topic again because apparently six-word writing is all the rage. Rachel enlightened us in the comments of my previous post:

“Someone once bet that Hemingway that he couldn’t tell a story using only six words. And he came up with the following: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Is it a story? No. Is it compelling as hell? Yeeeeeah.”

Just today I saw that the Freakonomics blog is hosting its own “six-word motto for the U.S.” contest. My favorites so far are:

Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay

AND

Just Like Canada, With Better Bacon

Is a new art form emerging, or are our attention spans so limited that we can’t handle longer prose…..