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Overwhelmed by Long Paragraphs

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Donald Morton
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02 Nov 2020, 12:08 pm

quaker wrote:
I am always very moved when I see people respond to people here who have written extremely long paragraphs.

However, any paragraph that is longer than fifteen lines I completely abandon. It's not that I don't care, I do. Even if the subject appeals to me, I just get overwhelmed and don't read it.

I use new paragraphs even when I don't need to, because they make it easier for me to read my own writing.

The same applies to commas. Commas help me breathe. They help me slow down.

Does this resonate with anyone else?



Same here. My eyes glaze over after reading a few sentences. It appears at times the number of words signifies that the post must be true.


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ToughDiamond
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02 Nov 2020, 2:05 pm

Dear_one wrote:
Paragraph breaks are what we use to find the next line to read. If there isn't one nearby, it is easy to skip or repeat a line.

Yes I think that's at least part of the objective reason why walls of text are so hard to read. If authors will just think to break their work up into paragraphs before hitting the Send button, they'll reach a larger audience.



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02 Nov 2020, 2:28 pm

Dear_one wrote:
I see that WP wipes out my paragraph indents.

Yes Facebook does that as well. Why in the world anybody would think it useful to delete leading spaces, I can't imagine, but that's what they do. The best workaround I've discovered to date is to type a string of dots separated by a few spaces between each dot. A lot of the spaces annoyingly get deleted, but some of them remain. Some places arrange things so that what you see when you're typing is what you see when you've submitted your post. IMHO that's the best way.



jimmy m
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02 Nov 2020, 2:44 pm

In school I was a poor reader/writer. But when I reached high school level, the school realized I had a problem and sent me to a very unusual type of class. It was a special education class and I was the only student. The closest I could describe this class was a course in "speed reading". I hated the sessions but I learned how to read well as a result.

As an Aspie, I have a short term memory problem. I would read the first sentence of a paragraph and then I would read the next. But by the time I finished the second sentence I forgot what the first sentence was about; so I would reread it. Then off to the third sentence but part way through that I forgot what the first two sentences were about, so I reread them. So it might take me an hour to read one paragraph - a single paragraph. What speed reading taught me is to quickly identify one or two key words in a paragraph. This was the essence of the paragraph. Once I found them, they would anchor the entire paragraph around those couple words. So instead of reading linearly, I would read information from the inside out. I learned to comprehend meaning by drilling down from those key words to frame the entire paragraph.

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO), this type of class should be a prerequisite for most Aspies with short term memory problems.


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02 Nov 2020, 3:11 pm

ToughDiamond wrote:
Dear_one wrote:
I see that WP wipes out my paragraph indents.

Yes Facebook does that as well. Why in the world anybody would think it useful to delete leading spaces, I can't imagine, but that's what they do. The best workaround I've discovered to date is to type a string of dots separated by a few spaces between each dot. A lot of the spaces annoyingly get deleted, but some of them remain. Some places arrange things so that what you see when you're typing is what you see when you've submitted your post. IMHO that's the best way.


Gad, yes. Typography used to be a proper profession. If those blank spaces were not worth the paper they were not printed on, the beancounters would have wiped them out a century ago. Now, they are free, but eliminated for the sake of a blocky, modern appearance. That "grey" selection on the fonts is for things like a large title overlaid on a yellow sky, but it gets used constantly, probably by people who have the contrast on their monitors set to max.



The Grand Inquisitor
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02 Nov 2020, 9:10 pm

This is absolutely me. I generally leave a space between every 1-3 sentences to make my posts more easily digestible, and I also use a lot of commas, in case anyone hadn't noticed.



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03 Nov 2020, 5:05 am

jimmy m wrote:
As an Aspie, I have a short term memory problem.


Mine has always been bad, and getting worse with age.
If I get dementia, there wouldn't be a noticeable difference. :mrgreen:



sport
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03 Nov 2020, 10:14 am

I guess the reason I don't use long paragraphs is never learned to spell very good part of being slow.