Paragraphing blog posts.

I was reading a helpful blog post over at Copyblogger and thought I'd highlight a particularly useful point.

9. Make your first paragraph short, no more than 1-2 lines (that’s lines, not sentences.) Vary your paragraph line length from here. It helps create visual dissonance and makes it easier to read your copy. And no paragraph should be more than 4-5 lines long at any time.

Source

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Yeah, I think that's a handy tool. To be honest, I don't want to read a few paragraphs to work out what they're talking about. A clear first sentence can tell me whether or not to be bothered reading the rest or not.

I tried it out in my latest post. What do you think?

If you look at some of my other posts, it's less wordy and dense and more to the point. Though, because I'm talking politics from a point of view that isn't mainstream, I may need to write some posts that are a bit more theoretical.

This is kind of what Darren Rowse was saying in ProBlogger about balancing your content between beginner readers and those who've been reading your blog for a while.

Yes, you'd do it like blogging any other place, just reduce the paragraph sizes to break it down and make it easier to read.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure blogger is unable to do the whole (more) thing. I know wordpress does it and I'm pretty sure it was one of the main reasons I moved from blogger.

Yeah, I just posted about our Prime Minister sending more troops to Afghanistan and I found it difficult to make the paragraphs so short.

I think it's easier to keep the first paragraph short to hook the header and then having a balance between long and short paragraphs in the middle, especially if you're trying to explain something that's less than straightforward.