The New Trend in Online News Writing?

Check out this story and tell me if you notice anything weird about it.

Did you catch it?

One sentence per line.

Is that not the ultimate in readability / lack of faith in your readers’ attention span?

This seems to be the trend in quite a few places — shorter and shorter paragraphs.

I guess this is the epitome of that trend; you can’t get any shorter unless you break the paragraph right in the middle of the sentence.

Interesting.

ashabot

Hmmm.... Thanks for the post. I work a lot with line breaks. They are crucial in poetry. There words not only function as highly focused lenses but over lap fields of perception and understanding and oscillate harmonics of meaning and inference so the placement of each on the page must be carefully considered. Sorry to get so heady. Just didn’t feel like wasting time dumbing the idea down although, as you point out, it’s the fashion. Too bad if people are offended at having to think twice, or once. The fact is that line breaks do not automatically turn prose into poetry … or better prose … an assumption made by a lot of people these days. Misused, line breaks are more likely to render, what might even be, readable prose into pretentious, self-conscious drivel.

Gary Fisk

This could be an attempt to capture the short attention spans that readers have on the web. On the other hand, maybe it's just bad writing technique. I often read undergraduate essays that are just one huge paragraph from beginning to end, which is the opposite of what you've described above. There are also some who tend to overuse bullet points and thereby turn their writing into one list after another. I think that this phenomenon is the result of writing without a clear sense of organization and purpose.

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