: Re: Do 'text walls' scare off readers? A comment on a recent question of mine claims Right, so that's [large unformatted text blocks scaring off some readers in certain contexts is] a myth.

@Rivera824

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I believe text-walls are highly subjective.

One general definition calls it a large amount of text without breaks. But what is large? I'm quite certain that what a 19th century reader considered an average paragraph is often considered large today. On the other hand, one must consider the medium. What one considers a large paragraph online is very often acceptable on paper.

I once read a blog entry (which I've failed to track down) from a university teacher (American, if memory serves me right). He claimed that the more time he spent online, the less patience he had for long chunks of text. There is also a wide controversy about attention span and the nefarious (or not) effects of the digital world. There was even a claim that people's attention span had fallen below the attention span of a fish.

Personally I have noticed that, since I've started reading online news that favour extremely short paragraphs (think 1-2 sentences per paragraph), I have indeed become impatient with traditional paragraphs on news articles. Once I went so far as to think "ugh, wall of text". But in fact, it wasn't; it was a well thought out text with far more information than what I'd been reading.

On the other hand, I accept rather long paragraphs in a book without any problems for as long as each one is a well-thought out unit.

This seems to imply that the length of what one usually reads dictates what one considers appealing or boring (in terms of length).

Bottom line: text-walls do exist. Text-walls will make a reader tune out and lose interest (though I wouldn't say it'll scare them). What leads a person to consider a given text a text-wall is subjective.

To avoid the problem, consider:

the medium (online begs for shorter paragraphs),
the target-reader (book readers may have a longer definition of paragraph than people who read mostly online or who dislike reading, whether those paragraphs are online or not)
the aim (to transmit specific information, a preferance for bullet points and naked, lonely facts is preferable; to create a more, let's call it rounded or contextualised information, go with more a traditional textual approach).

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