Want to Turn Off Your Article Readers - Make Giant Block Paragraphs, They Hate That

Well, 26,000 articles later I've learned a little bit about online article writing. I can tell you I sure made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. One of my biggest mistakes was taking some of my previous work, and adding to it, producing articles that were over 1000 words plus with big block paragraphs, often riddled with sentence structure errors, and misspellings. Interestingly enough, back when I started there wasn't as much content online as there is today, so at least I was able to get away with it, or so I thought. Some people still read some of what I wrote back then which I find fascinating.

Nevertheless, I imagine the larger percentage of readers that came to my articles clicked out because it was just too much time to invest in a large article with poor use of white space, and big block paragraphs. A reader clicking in would have to decide if they wanted to invest that kind of time, and then as they read they would have realized that although there was decent information in the article, it wasn't flowing, or worth their time to read. Yes, you live and learn.

Not long ago, I read an interesting blog post by Dave Copeland; "Best Practices for Writing For Online Readers," on March 16, 2012, where he stated; "Online writing is visual: Long, dense paragraphs turn off online readers. Create white space in your copy by keeping paragraphs short and using bulleted lists when appropriate. Use bold text to accent key information and use block or pull quotes to draw readers into the copy."

Yes, any experienced online article author knows these things, Copeland is right of course, and this is what everyone is recommending now. Nevertheless, as I've said, I had to learn all that the hard way, and I must've written three or 4000 articles before I figured this out. Perhaps, I was headstrong and wanted to do it my way, but when the reader that reads an article for them at least; it's their way, and it's their Information Highway and they own the next exit too.

If you want to capture the attention of your readers, and you don't want to turn them off, there's no sense in creating paragraphs any longer than the paragraphs in this particular article.

Now then, you can do whatever you want, and you can do it your way, and you don't ever have to change, but this is the online world, things are different now. You must present your information in the format that the reader wants, and also remember that half of these online readers have the attention span of a gnat. If you want to harvest some of their time, you need to be thinking here. Indeed I hope you will consider all this, and think on it.

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