gemini://alexschroeder.ch/Wall_of

Many pages on this site are huge walls of text, it’s true. I guess if you don’t want to read the wall of text, there are plenty of other sites to check out. I *want* my site to look like a wall of text.

Micro-blogging and photo-posting is a thing. There are plenty of sites that do it. I do my micro-blogging on the fediverse. I put things on my site when they don’t fit into micro-blogging status messages. Of course these things are going to be longer pieces!

I’m also not a friend of pictures for the sake of entertaining the reader. When I read a book, there aren’t many pictures. A picture can say more than a thousand words, if you’re trying to describe the picture. But pictures also take huge amounts of space. A small image of 200 KiB takes up the space of maybe 40,000 English words.

Pictures also involve work: I have to find them, process them (scaling them down, mostly), add them, make sure I’m not violating copyright – a process that I’m not enjoying.

Ideally, I’d like my text to be optimised for skimming, based on some old Norman Nielsen Group article from the last millennium. So bold should be important. And yet… I got infected with the thought that Garamond should not have a bold variant and I was reminded of older German typography using Sperrsatz – increased letter spacing. I even used it for a while. But I no longer do.

> “eine Schriftauszeichnung zur Hervorhebung von Textteilen durch Vergrößerung der Abstände … zwischen den einzelnen Buchstaben” – Sperrsatz

These days I’m mostly using Markdown with hardly any emphasis: plain text and block quotes, not too many lists except for lists of links and not too many links outside of lists.

Instead, I’m modelling my writing on essay writing. The visual style I’m aiming for is what I’d expect for a short story or an essay.

In a conversation with @22@octodon.social, I said that I used to be a fan of the Norman Nielsen early web advice: write top down. Important stuff comes at the top. Make it skimmable by using headers and bold phrases. But these days I’d say: it depends. This is how you write instructions, manuals, tech stuff. But this is not how you write an essay, a newspaper article, or a book. I suspect a lot of tech text writing advice is seeping into the rest of the world. For my blog, I recently switched my “vision” from short and to the point to “wall of text”.

More importantly, writing short and snappy blog posts feels like partaking and supporting the Internet attention deficit dogma. People have no time, are distracted, want a quick laugh – which is fine. But perhaps I also shouldn’t be writing for them. They’re better off without me, and I’m trying to not be one of them.

@babelcarp@social.tchncs.de said that one could see the question of writing for the web as a question of accessibility, quasi a reasonable accommodation for a busy stranger. And I agree, this is a tension that exists. When I think about the RPG Planet, for example, which also syndicates my RPG posts, I worry about the first paragraph of my post since that’s what’s going to end up there, stripped of all formatting. It’s a system made for skimming, to allow busy people to find the articles they might be interested in reading. I’d say the question for me as a blogger is how to accommodate these pressures.

Perhaps what I care most about is whether minimizing reader time is a goal I still share. Recent political developments have cast doubt on the lofty goal of accessible writing, in any case. All these decades writing for understandability. People use short sentences. Every point needs to be made explicit because we don't trust in readers picking up sarcasm, irony, inuendo. We highlight the important parts. And then Trump wins. Covid sceptics win. AfD wins. Was it even worth trying to reach the masses?

Perhaps reaching the masses does not happen via short articles with digestible quotes and nice headlines, subtitles, bold keywords, cat pictures, or any other kind of pictures. All we do is train people that reading the headlines and the first handful of words in a search engine result page is probably good enough.

> On the other hand, with the pandemic clearly illustrating how simple minded many people are, and having realised that for me as a person who is not writing manuals, instructions, nor working in public relations, as a journalist, or for the government, and being super simple to understand is not a top priority, I have started writing more in the style that I hear my inner voice using. – 2022-07-06 My inability to write well

Wall of Text