Writing For The Web
Blog writers still post unbroken “walls of text” as a way to convey intellectual heft and thoughtfulness. Yet, it takes more thought and empathy to break up text into readable chunks.
This is not a new idea. It is INTEGRAL to reading on the web, and on phones:
The American company that promoted the Internet hardest in its early days, Sun Microsystems, conducted research in 1997 into how people read on the Web and concluded simply, ‘They don’t.’ They scan, sampling words and phrases. Why? In part because any one page, on which the fluttering user happens to have lighted momentarily, competes for attention with millions more.
~James Gleick. 1999. Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. Vintage. p.87