Overwhelmed by Long Paragraphs

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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?

not for me, and i am guilty of doing this! a user awhile ago told me it's bad form to not split my long paragraphs into smaller chunks so i try to do that better now, but i forget a lot too.

Once upon a time in the distant past, I used to work for a publisher, as a reader of unsolicited material which arrived and editor of manuscripts contracted for publication. In those days typewritten scripts would arrive regularly via snail mail. Arrivals would be given a first skim readover of a few pages before going in the discard pile. The manuscripts written in wall text were instantly discarded, not even skim read, as it was considered that compentency in basic use of paragraphs was such an elementary skill that ignorance of this signified a waste of time even skim reading. Instant discard in that case. It was the first thing the owner of the firm taught me.

I have this problem with school books which is a huge disadvantage. When I try to read it, I can barely remember anything I've read.

My teacher assigns us pdfs to read for homework. Most of the time, the entire page is a huge wall of text. I highlight the entire page and let Text-to-Speech read it to me.

Came here just to see how your post was written

Something I've learnt from work is that 'Readability' is a skill. There is a daunting feeling when there are long paragraphs and I usually read the first couple of sentences and then try and weigh up if I want to continue reading.

As somebody who either talks very little or a lot I can see how it's easy to just want to capture your thoughts in a long endless stream of consciousness, but over time I have learnt that if you can put some thought in to it (and sometimes do a bit of editing) you can do something to help others pick it up. It's a bit harder on WP, but I always try and use formatting and if needed, bullet points to make it more visually interesting to the eye. Loads of text is just hard to take on.

I would definitely encourage people to just review their posts before sending and seeing if you can tweak the format. I believe all people are bad at picking up information, so you have to tweak it so that people don't miss any important into and don't get discouraged to stop reading half way through.

Excellent advise. Thank you.

I'm a slow reader. And a bunch of text overwhelms me too. So there are a lot of posts that I never read.

@quaker

Thanks.

Although looking back at it, I realised I should have re-read my own post and done the punctuation better!

Same. My brain is just like 'nope'.

Which is funny as I'm guilty of writing long posts.

There are walls of text on my tests for school.

My brain is like "NO!", but I have to get through anyway.

And then I'll be like, "What did I just read?"

Haha, I experience the same too

WP posts with long paragraphs can discourage readers from reading well.......long posts.

Can it be asked that boosting the use of paragraph breaks (with around 100 words at most between the paragraph-breaks), can have an (albeit) small influence on the overall dynamics of...............WP?

In short, might something as basic as paragraph-breaks clarify otherwise hard-to-understand content?

They certainly help.
There has been one case where the message in a wall of text seemed important enough that I copied it, added paragraph breaks and re-posted it in the thread so that the meaning of the original poster would not be lost through the effect a wall of text has on many readers

Necropost, but what the heck. <shrug>

I feel exactly the same.

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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. Some software tends to reduce them to just a shortened line. If your does that, you can help out with an extra line, or an old-fashioned indent to start the next paragraph.
While I'm ranting about typography, who else is finding a lot of on-line forms to fill out that are so faint that you have to click around to see what responds? There are also a lot of low-contrast fonts for text, which seem to defeat the whole purpose of writing.

I see that WP wipes out my paragraph indents.