Read the text. Match sentences with gaps (1 - 4) in the text. There are one extra sentence.

SHORT AND SWEET

People complain nowadays that the popularity of media like Twitter has reduced our ability to read for long periods of time and to write properly. It's also true that tweets are written by normal people, not professional authors, and that sometimes little attention is paid to correct grammar and spelling in digital messages. But are the new media only bad for our literary tradition?

In Japan, for example, the most popular form of poetry has long been the haiku, in which every word counts. A haiku is a poem with exactly seventeen syllables. Not words, but syllables. So with this method of writing, a lot of meaning has to be conveyed in a short space. This philosophy of 'less is more' made Japan the natural place for the birth of the cell phone novel with its very short chapters.

Other storytelling traditions using shorter forms have also been adapted to our modern tastes. The epistolary novel is a book written as a series of letters, or sometimes diaries. The genre used to be admired in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Authors of teenage novels now often use emails, diary entries, text messages and cartoons to tell a story.

So perhaps these shorter styles of writing are not bad for literature as a whole. Perhaps they are just modern ways of expressing the age-old tradition of storytelling.
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