Why do we write in a blocked paragraph format?

[Cuckoo]

Hopefully I'm using the right words to explain clearly- most, as in nearly all of the stories I have ever read on sites such as Adultfanfiction, fictionpress, and fanfiction, the writers tend to write their stories in a blocked paragraph type way, in that no indent at the beginning of the paragraph, a break between each paragraph, and so on. Is it is just an unspoken rule? Or just something people do just because it's easier? Forced setup of the website? Or... What? When I first started posting my own stories almost ten years ago, it was after reading numerous other stories on fanfiction, and just automatically took up the format, and never really thought about it otherwise until a little while ago.

[BronxWench]

Good question!

I'm going to go with it being the easiest format, since it is a default setup on most word processing software. When I open a new Word document, or LibreOffice document, I can choose my style from the options in the ribbon menu, but both "Normal" and "No Spacing" are block paragraph formats.

When I submit a manuscript to a publisher, they ask for block paragraphs, single spaced, no indents, Times New Roman 12 point typeface with a single line between paragraphs.

When I get a final galley to read, each paragraph is indented and the line between paragraphs is gone, so a published manuscript, ebook or print, is going to have the indented format.

I've seen authors indent paragraphs here, though. It can be done, either by the way you copy and paste to the text box (Copy from Word tends to preserve formatting best) or by manually editing in the Rich Text Editor, which can get tedious if it's a long chapter.

[CloverReef]

Personally, I started with the indented paragraph without the space between, but after I started posting on sites back in the early 2000s, some of them would lose the indent in the translation. I'd end up with a big wall of text. The block paragraph style seemed to be a format universally accepted, so I switched to that and stuck with it.

I think it also makes things easier to read on a screen. On paper, the indented paragraph and continual text is broken up by pages, but on screen, on the web, it's usually one continuous text all the way up until the end of the chapter (or story), and with no breaks between paragraphs that can look a little daunting to some people. Of course, with the exception of some e-book formats.

Edited March 13, 2016 by CloverReef

[PervOtaku]

It's a conscious design choice of HTML, the language that web pages are made of. The coding for paragraphs automatically provide a blank line between and no indentation. I could name a couple of ways to force it back to the more traditional presentation if you have full access to the code, but most story sites restrict the coding to a handful of very basic formatting features.

[BronxWench]

It's a conscious design choice of HTML, the language that web pages are made of. The coding for paragraphs automatically provide a blank line between and no indentation. I could name a couple of ways to force it back to the more traditional presentation if you have full access to the code, but most story sites restrict the coding to a handful of very basic formatting features.

For very good reason, I should point out. It's far too easy to crash a database like ours with too much access to the code, as was demonstrated a while back, before my time here. Given that we host over 9Gb of story data, that's a LOT to lose.