I noticed a while back: Paragraph length is often very different in books than in most blog posts, essays, etc. — at least for the books I read. The books have longer paragraphs; blog posts and essays shorter. That this should be so for blog posts is, perhaps, no surprise. As my friend Brad put it:

Blogging is its own form at this point. It isn’t an essay. Nor is it a scholarly article.…

Blogging is the shaggy dog of internet writing. It’s playful, experimental, occasional, topical, provisional, personal, tentative. It is inexpert, even when written by experts. It is off the cuff, even when polished and thought through.

And it is conversational, at its origins and in its form.

This is all exactly right. The “shaggy dog” quality of blogging is likely enough to explain the difference on its own. But the analogy to the essays I read in most magazines I have read suggests (to my mind, anyway) there is something else going on as well: something to do, perhaps, with the medium itself, its affordances and frictions.

It is by now a commonplace to observe that the margins of a book matter. Cramped, they make reading a chore. Expansive, they invite: reflection, yes, and commentary perhaps, but also delight. Beautiful proportions of text and page can, along with well-chosen type faces, make the act of reading far more pleasurable. A medium shapes our reception of its contents.¹

Consider common novel formats. A big trade paperback sits in the hand differently than a mass market paperback. A hardcover, though similar in size to the trade paperback, weighs more, bends less, might stay open better — though perhaps at the cost of a broken spine. An ereader is almost weightless. (Ebooks are actually weightless!) I emphasize here the physical weight because it matters. We tend — or at least, I do anyway, but I suspect you do too — to give more weight to things with more heft.² One can hardly imagine reading a serious monograph in a mass market paperback. It would not be fitting. Likewise, one can hardly imagine a collector’s edition, with heavy paper gilt at the edges and bound in a thick wooden cover, of a piece of pulp fiction (unless it should ascend to the status of a classic).

It is not only weight that matters, of course. So does density. So do page count, and page thickness, and height, and width, and thickness, and the texture of the pages — and of course the margins and the typesetting. Every physical attribute matters. And books and magazines and blogs have very different physical attributes, as a rule. I think we expect different things of them as a simple matter of course: responding to their physical attributes. A book is a heftier thing, so we allow for its arguments to run longer: if a paragraph ought to do a single thing,³ then the single thing it ought to do might be a good deal larger a thing in a larger medium.

One could overstate this case, of course. Not many authors (or editors!), it is true, allow their paragraphs to scrawl across whole pages and more. The modern life/self-help/business advice manual⁴ are certainly much more akin to your average blog post in paragraph structure.⁵ Some essays — in print or online — do let their arguments sprawl. Many fewer allow their paragraphs to run across even the thin columns of a magazine, though, and fewer still actually embrace the infinite canvas of a website. Does a magazine’s bigger page and thinner codex suggest a different shape to thoughts? Does the infinity of a web page actually nudge us away from longer thoughts, since we never know how far the page itself goes (other than, perhaps, via a scroll bar, often hidden in a modern OS)? Do the edges, like the margins, matter? Maybe.

Of course, it could also be that (a) the observation is a bit of selection bias going, or (b) that the reasons are mere cultural norms, with nothing to do with the media’s formal structures. Maybe!