Originally Posted by
John K Jordan
John,
Some comments on your idea and some constructive criticism of your writing.
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I have two editorial comments for you, one about your initial post and one about your submission to a periodical.
FIRST: considering your initial post. I agree with the others - your initial post is very difficult to read. Not because of the length - there are many very long posts. Not because of the content - it appears to be well thought out and well written. Not because of the words - the grammer and sentence structure is fine and I noticed few typos.
However your post is one of the most diffucult I have ever read because visually, all the sentences are jammed together! Browse this forum and others and look at some long posts. They are almost always broken up into paragraphs. Often the photos are interspersed with the paragraphs. Sometimes the writer includes a few words of caption with each photo which can make it easier to follow the ideas.
Here is a suggestion of how to go about this. Go ahead and write your text as one big block. Then go back and break it up into paragraphs to make it easy to read. Insert photographs between the paragraphs where appropriate. (NOTE: you can still do this by editing your post!)
Another way to approach organizing a long post with photos is to insert all photos first and leave some space between each one. Then write the text between each photo.
Your supposition that forum members here don't read much is flawed. In fact, a recent thread revealed that many here are avid readers! I personally read dozens of books each year and many articles.
One thing you might consider is how many busy people read forums. First, they look at the subject title and decide if they are interested enough to take a look. If so, they click on the post and often glance at the whole thing, notng the length, visual content, etc. This is a bit like turning a page in a magizine and glancing over the page.
Then, if still interested, they start reading the first few lines and decide whether to continue. If afraid you lost most readers before this. Reading through a huge block of text is a chore for the human eye and brain. This is MUCH worse if the lines are wide, for example all the way across the screen. Look at any magazine or newspaper. (Have you ever read one? Sorry, I couldn't resist!) All of these are printed in columns! It is too easy for the eye to lose the place when returning to the left side of a long line.
SECOND: Concerning your submission to a periodical. Editors are very busy people. They get 100s of submissions from hopeful people. But they are also human. If a submission is difficult to read and understand at first glance... guess what, it is ignored, trashed, forgotton. Next please. This is a very much like a personnel manager leafing through a stack of employment resumes. A quick glance at a few key points and it goes into one of several piles. The way a resume is organized says a lot about the way the person thinks.. I'm afraid a resume written as one huge paragraph would go in the pile at the bottom of the next to the desk.
My wonderful wife was an editor for years and reviewed scientific documents from all over the country. When she received a document like yours that lacked formatting she would not even read it. It would be returned to the author with a page of helpful guidelines.
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If you are interested in improving your writing so people will look at your content instead of the image it presents, there is a wealth of information on the internet and in books. Another very helpful thing is to get someone you trust to read the article and make constructive suggestions.
It is very helpful to first type a long document into a word processing program where it can be reviewed, edited, printed, and easily passed to others for review. Then when honed, it can be copied, prehaps in sections, into a new thread. Note that I did not do any of that for this lengthy response but just typed it into my iPad! It is likely poorly organized and full of typos. However, I'm not trying to make a good impression and get my ideas across to to the public. Just to you.
JKJ
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