Friday, March 19, 2010

Newspaper & Magazine Sentence Bre

-aks.

Lately, there have been reports on the decline of Newspaper and Magazine sales. This is partly understandable since the internet has offered news content for free. But there might be another more subtle reason. Something I’ve often noticed in Continued on page A3

A2 Very often, this results in a rather jarring reading experience, where you have to continually skip past other irrelevent articles to get to the next sentence. Usually, you’ll have to keep the first few letters of the last paragraph in mind while trying to find the next section. And chances are, that the other articles are more likely to get your attention than the ne- Continued on page A5

A3 newspapers is the rather annoying trend of cutting off a sentence midway.

A4 SEX! Now that I’ve got your attention, see this ad for a sports car!

A5 -xt part of the paragraph. Even more annoying if it started a new sentence with a name of a person or country, requiring more work from the reader to put the pieces together. The news are complex enough as they are – what’s the point in making it even more complicated?

A9 I’ve noticed that it’s only American newspapers that have this annoying feature. In Canadian newspapers such as the Montreal Gazette, National Post and Globe & Mail, they have a much more sophisicated way of page breaks. Continued on page A12


A11 In magazines, it can be even worse. They’ll have the cover topic buried somewhere in the folds of the pages of the magazine. And chances are it’ll be only a few pages long before it continues onto another page further Continued on page A20

A12 They have their breaks with a completed sentence, and a page number for the next part. This allows better reading comprehension as well as letting the eye and mind wander through other articles that might seem interesting. And you can read the rest of the article without having to backtrack where the previous sentences Continued on page A22

A15 It’s not surprising that people are graviating towards internet articles, where even lengthy topics can be posted on a single page. Any annoying back & forth is diminished since they don’t have to end mid-sentence. Even if the article continues on another link, it’s easy to continue your train of thought as long as you avoid being distracted by other ads & news on the webpage.


A16 If worse comes to worse, you can just copy & paste the entire article onto a word document. (For those of you annoyed with the little inconsistencies in underlined links & text sizes, I reccomend pasting onto a wordpad, then copying the whole thing again. The only minus is any bolded or underlined words are normalized) That way, the amount of attention you need to focus is limited to just Continued on page A23

A20 within the magazine. And then it’ll continue on for another few paragraphs before it’ll be cut off a few sentences shy Continued on page A21


A21 of completion, and is grouped around one single page with other articles that


A22 were stopped short.

A23 one.

A24 page.

A25 What’s more perplexing are those articles that require you to turn back a Continued on page A24

3 comments:

  1. Very insightful and funny.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Awesome! Don't think I've heard anyone talk about this before, and definitely not as well!

    ReplyDelete