I recently saw a question in one fb group where a guy was asking about one sentence paragraphs and should you use them or not.
He published a post on some other fb group and got this comment from someone who probably got his feelings hurt way to much:
“Because we all trust a claim about startups from a site about writing that can’t be bothered to use more than one sentence per paragraph.”
So of course, he was wondering, is this something wrong to do and should you do it?
My take on it, and what I’ve answered to him is pretty simple:
Don’t have set rules on this, just make sure it’s readable and have a medium in mind.
Where is the user most likely going to read this?
And is the text easy to read/follow?
If you haven’t noticed already, 90% of my daily emails are made up of one sentence paragraphs.
But that’s exactly it, they are emails and a lot of emails get read on mobile screen.
So when you do one sentence paragraphs, on mobile, they look pretty nice and easy to read through.
When you open it on desktop email client, again, they are easy to read through. But that’s also because my emails aren’t stretched to full screen (or you have a smaller reading window) and you usually end up with nicely packed paragraphs.
Now if you look at any of my long articles on the site, you’ll see the difference from my daily emails.
My articles have more sentences in paragraphs.
Because these are mostly read on desktop, but even on mobile it’s not that bad to read through as the paragraphs don’t end up too big.
Imagine I did a 2000 word article with just one line sentences, it would be a scroll fest.
Or if I packed it into only 5 paragraphs.
Bottom line is, when it comes to copy structure, just make sure it’s easy to read through – so your eyes don’t have to jump from left to right too much or that they get lost in a wall of text.
And try to have a medium in mind, where will the message most likely get read?
One sentence paragraphs, multiple sentence paragraphs…doesn’t matter as long as it’s easy to read to get the point across, everything else is just a result of your style/personality.
Cheers,
Zoran