Meta shareholders are suing CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with current and former executives, for more than $US8 billion ($12.2 billion) in fines and other costs following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
I know, my question was not directly why its in this news this way. Its a more general question by me. I don’t get it. Lot of personal blogs do this too, BTW. In my opinion this is “wrong”. A paragraph should consists multiple sentences, that contain a single thought process or something else to group. Its like in programming code to do every single statement a blank line in between. Instead an idea should be grouped together into a block. Just an analogy with code. /My Opinion
My believe is, they want intentionally make the post look bigger. Instead 3 or 4 paragraphs (which would be the entire article in this case) they spread it out like this. So you have to scroll and see more ads and links and they have more possibilities to put more ads and links in between every paragraph. /My Conspiracy
Edit: Maybe there is something else. Lot of people read news articles on smartphones. And text would wrap around very quickly and look longer than they are. So maybe using more paragraphs gives more room between each sentence. As I am not reading much on smartphones, can’t judge this. But I still don’t like this. /My Edit
I think it’s partly because many people are only semi literate, and breaking the text up helps people read it. A larger block of text is "intimidating’
2 or 3 sentences in row might look intimating for some (I still don’t buy this reasoning, did they ever visit a school?), but I think it actually hinders readability and not improves. Because every sentence is its own paragraph, the brain won’t find the connected sentences that build up a uniq thought process. Breaking up text with logic makes more sense for readability and is even better for quickly scanning through text.
I don’t believe breaking up text for each sentence makes it more readable. Even for those who say it makes, because I think they are “wrong”. Sorry if I came over a opposite-argumentative, but this is a thing that bothers me a lot when reading and I just explain why I think its wrong.
Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. I think speed and accuracy of reading is also pretty low (I read like 80 wpm and 80% accuracy somewhere, but i couldn’t immediately find a good source for that).
If you’re on a text forum like this you’re probably well above the average person, and your experiences are not universal.
That said, I don’t have any data on hand about readability so you could be right. I’m sure people have studied it.
The short paragraphs thing predates smartphones and the collapse of print newspapers (here’s a paper from 1996 that does it), so fwiw I don’t think it’s that. I assume it’s some sort of stylistic / presentation thing that’s just normalized in news reporting. Maybe it’s an outdated holdover from print media somehow (where presumably more spacing = more expensive, so it presumably wasn’t a financial motivation) but I think orgs would’ve moved on by now if it was purely done for unnecessary legacy reasons.
Why is every sentence in its own paragraph??
That’s… pretty common for news sources?
I know, my question was not directly why its in this news this way. Its a more general question by me. I don’t get it. Lot of personal blogs do this too, BTW. In my opinion this is “wrong”. A paragraph should consists multiple sentences, that contain a single thought process or something else to group. Its like in programming code to do every single statement a blank line in between. Instead an idea should be grouped together into a block. Just an analogy with code. /My Opinion
My believe is, they want intentionally make the post look bigger. Instead 3 or 4 paragraphs (which would be the entire article in this case) they spread it out like this. So you have to scroll and see more ads and links and they have more possibilities to put more ads and links in between every paragraph. /My Conspiracy
Edit: Maybe there is something else. Lot of people read news articles on smartphones. And text would wrap around very quickly and look longer than they are. So maybe using more paragraphs gives more room between each sentence. As I am not reading much on smartphones, can’t judge this. But I still don’t like this. /My Edit
I think it’s partly because many people are only semi literate, and breaking the text up helps people read it. A larger block of text is "intimidating’
2 or 3 sentences in row might look intimating for some (I still don’t buy this reasoning, did they ever visit a school?), but I think it actually hinders readability and not improves. Because every sentence is its own paragraph, the brain won’t find the connected sentences that build up a uniq thought process. Breaking up text with logic makes more sense for readability and is even better for quickly scanning through text.
I don’t believe breaking up text for each sentence makes it more readable. Even for those who say it makes, because I think they are “wrong”. Sorry if I came over a opposite-argumentative, but this is a thing that bothers me a lot when reading and I just explain why I think its wrong.
Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. I think speed and accuracy of reading is also pretty low (I read like 80 wpm and 80% accuracy somewhere, but i couldn’t immediately find a good source for that).
If you’re on a text forum like this you’re probably well above the average person, and your experiences are not universal.
That said, I don’t have any data on hand about readability so you could be right. I’m sure people have studied it.
The short paragraphs thing predates smartphones and the collapse of print newspapers (here’s a paper from 1996 that does it), so fwiw I don’t think it’s that. I assume it’s some sort of stylistic / presentation thing that’s just normalized in news reporting. Maybe it’s an outdated holdover from print media somehow (where presumably more spacing = more expensive, so it presumably wasn’t a financial motivation) but I think orgs would’ve moved on by now if it was purely done for unnecessary legacy reasons.
Your news sources are not the same as mine
Nonetheless, it’s pretty common for news sources.
E.g.:
All use this style of paragraphs. It’s not universal but I’m surprised that it’s surprising anybody!
Wow, I never noticed it!