Monday, October 6, 2014

#2: Why "Powder" is Enjoyable to Read

To me, "Powder" is more pleasant to read than "Girl" or "Christmas Tree" because it follows standard paragraph formatting. I have a hard time reading "Christmas Tree" because the line breaks are at weird places, I know its because so the poem will look like a tree but its still irritating. "Girl" is a little better, but not by much; its one big long paragraph. My eyes look at that big block of text and think "this is an eyesore". "Powder" is pleasant to read because it makes good use of white space to create a story that's pleasant to the eye and pleasant to the mind.

In high school we're told that we should make a new paragraph when we move on to another line of thought, but the real reason we do so is to create white space that makes reading pleasant to the eye. "Powder"' has a lot of paragraphs that are five to six lines long, but has a lot of paragraphs that are much smaller mixed around those large paragraphs, this creates a smooth line for the eye to follow. Also studies show that taking a big task and separating it into a bunch of smaller tasks makes things easier for us to do, and the same goes for the reading eye. And because "Powder" mixes up the lengths of its paragraphs, its more fun to read than "Christmas Tree" and "Girl".

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