Saturday, May 17, 2008

Short Paragraphs Attract - Long Paragraphs Intimidate

Paragraphs are fantastic authorship tools. They assist form textual matter into succinct units of measurement of thoughts and information. They also add ocular alleviation by inserting achromatic space into the written document and breakage up the text, making it more than inviting to the reader.

Too many authors neglect to take advantage of these benefits by making their paragraphs too long. Long paragraphs typically convey pieces of textual matter together that would be better off detached for organizational purposes. They also make long balls of textual matter that intimidate readers. (If you desire your readers not to read something, bury it in a long paragraph.)

Look at the followers magazine article excerpt....

If you could travel to a physician and acquire a prescription for the maladies of large metropolis living, that prescription would be Orofino, Idaho.

Sick of bumping into people everywhere you go, fighting traffic, waiting in long lines? Tired of being trapped in a choking environment of asphalt, brick and concrete? Defeated with the feverish gait of a life that's insulated from the natural beats of nature?

Take a dose of Orofino. You'll experience much better very soon.

That's because Orofino (Spanish for "fine gold") is the gold criterion in small-town, western America. The community have all the possible of becoming a full-blown travel finish like Jackson, Wyoming, but have not yet lost its innocence. It stays untainted and real.

Now check up on out the same text, this clip packed together into a single paragraph....

If you could travel to a physician and acquire a prescription for the maladies of large metropolis living, that prescription would be Orofino, Idaho. Ill of bumping into people everywhere you go, fighting traffic, waiting in long lines? Tired of being trapped in a choking environment of asphalt, brick and concrete? Defeated with the feverish gait of a life that's insulated from the natural beats of nature? Take a dose of Orofino. You'll experience much better very soon. That's because Orofino (Spanish for "fine gold") is the gold criterion in small-town, western America. The community have all the possible of becoming a full-blown travel finish like Jackson, Wyoming, but have not yet lost its innocence. It stays untainted and real.

Which treatment is more than appealing to you? If you're wish the huge bulk of people, you establish the multi-paragraph version much easier to read - more than visually inviting. The achromatic spaces pull the eye, breaking up the information into bite-size pieces. (This uses even if you're using the paragraph formatting with indented first lines and no lines between paragraphs.) The multi-paragraph attack also allowed for more than than careful organisation of the information the writer was trying to convey, and allow him visually protrude out the "Take a dose of Orofino...." statement, giving it more impact.

One word of caution: Don't travel overboard with this! I have got seen whole pages filled with long twines of tiny, one- Oregon two-sentence paragraphs. I establish myself hungering for a longer paragraph to interrupt things up. A assortment of paragraph sizes simply looks better, so don't be afraid to throw longer 1s into your ms occasionally, as long as they do sense from an organizational standpoint.

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