...between paragraphs, that is.
Reading on-screen is different than reading on a page but any large block of text can be difficult to read if the eye cannot find an anchor point to return to when it reaches the end of a line.
Since HTML removes the indents at the beginning of paragraphs, the online standard has become to put a blank line between paragraphs. Or at least, a blank line every few lines (a la Maddy Bell) if the lines are short.
This makes the text more readable. How much more? Infinitely in my case, I literally cannot read a screenful of text with no blank lines. Plus, it gives me a headache to try. There are stories on BC I cannot read unless I download them and reformat.
A paragraph that is longer than one line should always be followed by a blank line. And even in blocks of short paragraphs, there should be a blank line every four or five lines. Also, a paragraph should not be longer than about five lines.
How long is a line? About six to fifteen words. Yeah, it varies a lot, depending on the screen format. Two or three sentences make reasonable size paragraphs. Four sentences are about the maximum for on-screen reading with comfort, unless the sentences are very short.
So be kind in these days of social distancing, give us some space! ...between paragraphs. :)
Hugs,
Erin
Comments
It's called "white space".
White space always makes it easier to read. When I was in my high school typing class, every paragraph had to be followed by a double carriage return. (Enter key on an electronic keyboard.)
When I first started to use computer word processors Word Perfect was the one I hooked up with. It was not a WYSIWYG program. You had to be able to visualize what you wanted for an output and insert the appropriate commands to make it happen. That meant paragraphs needed that double break between them.
I know I'm not alone. Some the old-timers here still insert *bold* or _italic_ command in their writing. Even when I started working with MS Word, if I downloaded some text with those commands inserted I could go through with a global search and replace, hitting the find button twice then the replace button and Word would replace the text with bold or italic.
Oh the good old days when you needed to be a bit of a geek to work a computer. Somehow I miss them.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin ein femininer Mann
Back when we had control of our computers?
Patty, I too remembrance about the "good ol days" when we had control of our own computers instead of whatever OS is now installed. Oh we had an OS alright but it was a dumb OS. It only did what we commanded it to. DOS, MSDOS, IBMDOS remember those? Amazing we still have to revert back to some of those commands when we get a glitch MS doesn't self medicate. Proves Win no matter what generation is still using DOS as the basic underlying structure.
Win XP was the pentacle of the Win game. And ghosting it in a shell only slowed it down a little but was the ultimate shield against any virus attack. Time to leave this game to the younger generation who do programing in systems I haven't a clue what they are doing.
hugs
Barb
Life is a gift. Life is meant to be lived, not worn until it's worn out.
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
The Yacks! The Yacks! The Yacks!
The dreaded Talk Sickness, also known as the Dummies, or the Yacks.... So named since the first symptom is a yacking manner of speech like a ventriloquist's dummy. In a few hours the blood coagulates and rots in the veins. The throat swells to the size of a watermelon and death usually results from asphyxiation. From the onset the victim's mental faculties are affected. He loses all sense of human decency or consideration for his fellows. Knowing himself doomed he delights in infecting others. Here is a crowded restaurant, two men are talking at the bar: "What do you think about this merger, JB? Off the record...." "It sucks," JB yacks. Silence falls like a thunderclap. "THE YACKS! THE YACKS! THE YACKS!" scream the patrons as they rush the exits. It's the most contagious disease ever seen on this planet. Here is a crowded commuter train. "Tickets please," the conductor yacks. "THE YACKS! THE YACKS! THE YACKS!" The commuters pull the emergency cord out of its socket but even as the train grates to a halt the whole car is yacking. A country singer goes dummy on stage: "Stay all night and stay a little longer..." Just a hint of a yack. The crowd stirs uneasily in their seats. "Take off your coat and throw it in a corner..." No doubt about it. "THE YACKS! THE YACKS! THE YACKS!" "Don't see why you don't stay a little longer..." They are piled up three-deep at the exits where 132 died. Perhaps one percent of those stricken adapt themselves to the sickness and form outlaw bands. They will swarm out of a derelict building and yack in the faces of pedestrians: "We love New York!" or stick their heads into car windows and yack out: "Have a nice day!" The putrid smell of rotten blood hangs over cities of the world like a smog. "It's a real Hollywood Spectacular!"
~A little pandemic story by William Burroughs (stuck without rhyme or reason into a whole book of similar gibberish) that I thought was timely here in the Year of the Virus; with dialogue italicized by me to make it a tad easier to read, which is kind of in violation of what I'd originally set out to do, but oh well. It really reminds me of something I would have written in my 20's (I have one story of my own that's an 11 page sentence but when I found I discovered it's on paper, not a file, and I'm not about about to retype it just to annoy people and get attention...)
A lot of writers new to this site post stories where you can tell the formatting took away the spacing between lines of dialogue, and if they're short enough I'll download them onto Open Office and put the spaces in myself so I can read them. Then I come back here and discover the problem's been fixed.
~hugs, Veronica
Well shit, I guess it really CAN happen here..,
.
Hmm.
TL;DR
:)
I understand.
In Google Docs (which is what I write in*) I can just change the line spacing and it all works out beautifully but when I post them here I have to go to each individual paragraph and make a space. It's annoying but worth it.
I think the hardest part for me is actually going through and making thoughts italics. Especially since I started using *thought* instead so suddenly changing might mess with people's heads.
*If you work in Google Docs as well and want to know how this works simply click Format, Line Spacing, and then click Custom Spacing. It'll bring up a new window. I keep Line Spacing at 1.15. Before at 0 and After at 6. Using these settings works wonderfully.
Katherine
We have gotten lazy
when it comes to document layout.
Mind you the dumb... no make that frankly stupid choices that the likes of Microsoft have made (and still do) when it comes to document layout and formatting especially when you are dealing with multi-part documents that results is lots of banging of heads against brick walls has a lot to do with it.
So we make do.
I'm with Erin in that any story or indeed any document I see that is just a screenfull of text is totally ignored. There is one person in my writing class that delights in writing our weekly 300 word assignments in one paragraph. I have to review this person's work next week! My first job will be to reformat it. their stories are also dialogue heavy but almost devoid of indication as to who said what. So I end up formatting them as a play. But... as Mr Gumby used to say on Monty Python... "My brain hurts"
None of us are perfect formatters but please, please use whitespace if you want people to read your work and begin to understand it.
Samantha
Choice of tools for the job
I write my stuff using LibreOffice Writer (which once was OpenOffice, which once was StarOffice...) but I have always saved the files as HTML.
This means that I don't get into a lot of the obscure formatting funnies that most word processors seem to assume the writer wants. It also means that I don't have to write raw HTML, the program inserts that for me.
To post, I open the file in a plain text editor, for me this is currently "Mousepad"; for some reason Debian keeps changing the name but it is basically a Notepad clone. Any text editor would do. Then, on the submission page, I simply Select All and Cut'n'Paste the whole lot in.
The next step is to adjust the "Text format" dropdown from "Filtered HTML w/line breaks" to "Filtered HTML w/o Line Breaks". That's all.
Since <p> is a paragraph in HTML a browser will automatically make space between that and the next one, so I don't have to do anything else.
No fiddling with line spacing or paragraph spacing. I can just get on with writing.
Penny