I tend to read a lot of writing on the internet. Perhaps you’re like me. Perhaps, like me, you have noticed that reading words on the internet is different in certain respects than reading words on a printed page. Perhaps you have enumerated these differences to yourself and discovered the key difference, the pothole in this transition from page to screen, the absence that makes the heart grow fonder. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about indentation.
Remember when paragraphs each had uniformly sized indentations? Finish reading one paragraph and there is another blank little gap in the bricks of prose, letting you catch your breath. But put those paragraphs on a screen and they lose their wonderful indentations. They now have a blank line in between them, each rectangle floating out on its own. Why is this?
I think it’s because the indentation was difficult to achieve in early HTML. Something about creating that type of blank space, how to define its width. Like if you’re laying out a book or just typing on a page, the indentation width is somewhat proportional to the margins of the physical page itself. If you had a standard 8.5×11″ American-type page but with a 4″ indentation for each paragraph, that would appear odd, off, a mistake, unless you are being intentionally House of Leaves-ian. But on the internet, via the HTML code rendered legible via a browser, text on the screen is malleable. The margins are never really fixed. This is both the glory and the irritation of the hypertexted text. Frictionless delivery through time and space, no more waiting for the ice to melt in the harbor to get those pallets of paperbacks out to the stores, you can just upload that sucker. But then, everyone’s not going to read your upload on the same worn out Dell. Suzy has a sleek little laptop. Sammy’s got an iPad. Sterling’s got a gaming tower with enough juice to mine a meme-coin. And grandma can’t figure out how to make it all look bigger on her phone.
Actually I put on my child’s new VR headset and was briefly immersed in the panoramic view and thought: I could get some good work done in here. However, moving stuff around with my hands feels odd. I am old enough to really like a keyboard and a mouse. I like to click. And when the clicker doesn’t work, I like to rap that sucker three good times on the dining room table, turn it over and blow on it hard, and then proceed with my work. I’m just an analog kid, still.
But my point is that with ever-changing margins, the paragraph indentation becomes vestigial. You can technically add traditional indentation to your blog posts, but it’s going to look weird, and everyone is going to think you’re no fun. It’s easier and quicker to have each paragraph separated by a line break, and we all like easier and quicker.
And this is not fundamentally evil, but I still miss the indentations. I can feel them itching in their absence. Back in the olden times, when we mostly read stories and essays and blog posts in books, the line space, as opposed to the paragraph indentation, was meant to indicate some kind of change, like a scene change, or chronology change, or some kind of throat-clearing pivot that the reader had learned to intuit. A line break was a different degree of break from an indentation, just the way a chapter break was an even greater break with the continuity of the prose experience. (The chapter break is out of scope of this essay1.) It means that I have to subtly readjust when reading online. Those are just regular paragraph divisions, I tell myself, not some greater gap in coherence.
In grad school, we called those free floating paragraphs crottes, using the french word for spot of excrement. We got this from a professor who had gotten it from his professor. At the time it didn’t seem pejorative to refer to unindented paragraphs as droppings of excrement that fell down the page, it was just part of the grad seminar argot, but now I wonder if there wasn’t some generational judgment there. But now crottes are everywhere. One scrolls endlessly through the crottes. You never know where to take a break because all of the sectional divisions are uniform. The only graphical punctuation now are ads or the pleading subscription buttons or the skimmable subheads.
Perhaps this isn’t a sign of encroaching illiteracy but just a sign of changing literacy. Words were once not even separated by spaces, sentences by periods. Those bits of punctuation had to be invented. Paragraphs used to be indicated by the pilcrow, that westward-facing P-shape. At some point, those marks were lost, but the unit of thought that the paragraph had come to represent jumped the line and grew the indentation. And now it’s jumped the line again and floats on slightly freer from the text that comes before or after. Our text becomes slowly more aerated through the changing technology. Call it the breeze of progress.
1. Post? Blog? Substack? Rant? Article? I am going to pretentiously continue to use the term essay. It captures the gist, the tradition, while still being elastic enough to contain whatever it is I’m up to. Becca Rothfeld recently tried to distinguish between “posting” on Substack and “writing” for the Washington Post, to much general confusion and ire. But it’s all text, it’s all writing, with subjects and verbs. (And hopefully proofreading! Substackers: get better at proofreading!) The number of editorial intermediaries is different. And there are potentially different contextual expectations of formality, but it’s still all writing. But modern cyber publishing is convenient enough, machine-enabled enough, that it almost feels like talking, though it still hits like writing, at least to the reader. Also, everyone is worried about how artificial intelligence might affect writing, but I would say we are already using artificial intelligence to write. E.g., I can’t code this page myself.