May 21, 2023

Advantages of a wall of text

 

Most tutorials about writing are explaining to the reader, that a wall of text is an antipattern which should be avoided for any costs. in contrast, a well structured and image enhanced text is prefered because it makes reading much easier for the audience.
In this blog post the opposite perspective should be explained. The starting point is the assumption that avoiding a wall of text is a trivial case. Creating a well structured text which is easy to read can be realized with a power point presentation. According to the self definition a powerpoint presentation contains only of keyterms plus visual gimmicks like tables and images but doesn't provide prose text. in addition each slide has a title and can be grasp in a short amount of time.
Or let me explain it the other way around. All the existing powerpoint presentations including LaTeX generated beamer presentation are avoiding a wall of text. There is no shortage in easy to read documents but there is a difference between a presentation and a prose text The working thesis is, that so called longer text aka a paper has to be a wall of text, otherwise it is not a paper but something else. In addition, a novel which is a fictional text is also a wall of text because in the other way it is a comic book or a movie which is a different category.
It is simply unfair to argue, that a 500 pages long fictional book is a wall of a text, because such a layout pattern is the self-understanding of a book. It is not possible to write a text which has many thousands words but do not format it as a wall of text.
Rejecting a wall of text is equal to rejecting the idea of a book in general. With this judgment in mind all the newspapers, academic papers and books have to be dismissed because they are containing of endless amount of text and only non books are allowed. This would include power point presentations, comic strips, dialogues between people and TV shows. In these case there is no longer text available.
The term typography in the core sense means usually to format a longer amount of text.