I read this one a while back, then after re-reading a few of my blog posts, and WHOOPS, I’ve been called out.
Is over-formatted blogs / articles a bugbear for anyone else? I like to write that way because it is easy to structure my thinking as a writer, and skim as a reader. Now wondering if I should aim higher in my writing.
i mean, i like indented lists and headings when im drafting outlines and thoughts. good for getting the raw idea out there, without bothering about topic sentences and transitions. and i like structure & hierarchy, makes searching for relevant info within the article easier too. thats why i like markdown so much, it deals with the formatting for me and i can just write. i dont think theres no better or worse here, and each style has its uses. off the top of my head i think the first style, id use it more in drafting stuff, but one publicly-presented use case would be recipes. wouldnt you like
rather than
for the ingredients, get one cup of flour, as well as the same amount of milk, and two tbsp of butter.
with the ingredients ready, we can start baking. preheat the oven to 999 celsius. while its heating up, pour all the ingredients together. then, put the mixture into the oven and bake for 999 hours.
but with like a more narrative-focused post, the second one would be better
so yeah, i dont think one is better than the other, just different use cases sometimes!
I’ve noticed it on a lot of modern blogs, but it doesn’t bother me at all. Unless you’re forcing your writing to be something that doesn’t feel right to you, all formats are valid!
Hm, interesting. I think it’s useful if a blog can have formatting options, really I’ve ever only seen Exhibit A as a style guide like the one my site has.
Honestly, I think a much more interesting conversation would be about information design, ie. how blog posts communicate information more generally, and in comparison to other mediums of writing. For example, I know that the amount of sentences I put per paragraph is far less than compared to my academic writing. Why? I think it’s far more accessible both to the reader and to me, the writer, to have the white space and breathing room.
But that can be taken too far. I’ve seen particularly popular bloggers and online writers write far less per paragraph, though. Sometimes a single sentence, sometimes a single word. LinkedIn Broetry comes to mind. I think at this point, the thoughts are sparse to the point of no longer holding any weight of utility.
Sometimes, I split up sections with ## headers and more rarely use ### subheaders, but again this is an attempt at being more considerate and accessible to the reader, rather than trying to game SEO. Sometimes I just use separators --- instead. More rarely, I don’t split up sections at all.
Also—how do you cite and reference? I just use inline links (like the one above) rather than any formal formatting system (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) because again, it feels like it interrupts the text less and makes the reading more accessible.
But maybe all of the above is too casual/nonchalant? Just going off of vibes instead of having an actual structured way of consistently writing in a standardized manner. I doubt it, though.
Generating unique, interesting ideas and having the skill to communicate those ideas well are two different things.
I really appreciate longform content that has handcrafted design, like this Stuff article on Te Urewera, or this Guardian article on Deepfakes, or this Huffington Post article on Millennials. All of which could be described as being over-engineered or prioritizing form over function (I mean, they’re super bulky and render-heavy), but they are also an artform in their own right.
I think above all else, the readability of your blog should come first, then you can worry about everything else, especially if it’s just a hobby! So long as the excessive formatting doesn’t interfere with the ability to:
It’s not a big deal. : )
I personally like to use formatting sparingly because that’s what I learned while studying creative prose–but I also use em-dashes all the time too now because of it lol. (Actually, Roald Dahl is why I’m obsessed with em-dashes, he used them so well!)
Anyway . . . So long as it’s accessible and doesn’t break stuff like screen readers (or people’s brains) it’s not something to worry too much about.
Reminding me I need to go and re-read Rold Dahl now lol I loved his prose as a youngun
Interesting post! I’m not sure where my writing falls on the spectrum between “formatted” and “narrative.” If I were writing a post about my life, it would definitely be closer to the latter end, while a write-up of some technical bug would be closer to the former.
I do think that a narrative style is certainly more enjoyable to read, so maybe I should keep this in mind when I get back to blogging. But I don’t think I would ever completely renounce headings and lists, since they’re very good for accessibility and readability when used appropriately.
(Side note, I’ve been reading a lot of romance fiction lately, and the stylistic difference in some of the novels is really noticeable. Short sentences, missing verbs and articles. Sort of clipped. Not completely off-putting, but strange. It makes me wonder if LLMs were trained on a lot of romance novels—or perhaps more likely, all of the romance fanfic on AO3.)
(Side note, I’ve been reading a lot of romance fiction lately, and the stylistic difference in some of the novels is really noticeable. Short sentences, missing verbs and articles. Sort of clipped. Not completely off-putting, but strange. It makes me wonder if LLMs were trained on a lot of romance novels—or perhaps more likely, all of the romance fanfic on AO3.)
You could make the argument that the quantity of AO3 type fiction is a massive chunk if the pre-training data
But generally speaking, the “style” of LLMs mostly comes from fine tuning. So the short sentences and that comes from all the RLHF.
My off-the-dome theory is that this is leakage from the fact that many people writing blogs or even entertainment online are also working online. Writing is a much larger part of many people’s work than it has ever been. Maybe the real question is why we are driven to format this way in our work writing. I’ve been admonished many times at work with “make it bullet points” or “use easier words and shorter sentences”. All of which are probably good direction for writing at work. When those habits bleed over into my personal writing, that’s when things get weird.
I think it’s the tone, haha, their overformatted example reminds me of marketing pages that really want to sell you an idea or product. They use bolds, italics, quotes, color changes, whatever, and speak in really clipped sentences. Because that’s how people who make bold statements talk. Or something. Nike. Just do it.
I work in a ticket support system, and let me tell you, people are bad at writing requests. Then we got a person to go thru the request and put it into real industry words for us, and tack that as a note on top. Then we got the AI summary also. The ticket kicks off a bunch of back and forth messages, so we want to know if you are really really sure you want me to delete this page on 200 sites. So our messaging is done best with formatting like bold bullet points and “if I do that, THIS WILL HAPPEN” language. So we need formatting to make that a lil more bearable ( but it still sucks ). We all got too much fatigue to read paragraphs, everyone is constantly missing things even when it’s served up well. RIP. I feel like more concise and direction oriented speaking would make it better
AI written articles suck in their own right because I think they are imitating that marketing page vibe also. But it comes off like a 5th grader that wants to make the book report as long as possible. It puts in emojis in headings / bullets and talks in circles and makes a lot of “in summary” concluding general remarks but then forgets to conclude, keeps talking. So I think it is sort of like a technique to sow trust and interest before it completely loses it because it doesn’t know wtf it’s talking about
Blogs dont go far enough with formatting.
Formatting is the simplest expressive element to implement into blogs. There is standardization around SEO optimised text, and it ought to be a call for bloggers that they need to go even more insane and not less.
This is only assuming SEO is the goal though. I don’t write for search engines. I write for the people I specifically give my link to.
The blog post in the OP mentioned SEO as a reason why people write using formatted text, which is the idea I was responding to.
I mean “all formats are valid” is a response and is true, but I’m trying to add to the discussion here. Its just so obvious, when I want to encourage people to go further and play with formatting and multimedia more.
I’ve noticed it and assumed it was due to people likely spending less time typing out a blog post compared to a more formal text. I don’t use this style but I don’t spend a lot of time pondering things like word choice or carefully proofreading my blog posts.
I’d say it’s valid and it doesn’t bother me that people use it, though it does come across as hyper/scattered compared to flowing text. Maybe I’m biased because I usually see this in the specific context of blog posts where the writer is just, say, giving us a bunch of smaller updates. Again, it’s not how I prefer to write but I don’t have a strong opinion about it.
Outside of personal blogs, I hate it. I remember when listicles where suddenly everywhere. If something is written as a listicle or something, I’ll usually ignore it. Prioritising people’s short attention spans or SEO doesn’t tend to result in quality and I’ve got better things to do with my time on this Earth than engage with content that condescends to me while probably trying to sell me something.