One of the most insidious impacts of LLMs is the online death of the paragraph. You know exactly what I mean.

• Here is a bullet point — it is bold for no meaningful reason. The author does not trust me to have the attention span to read what they have to say.

• Here is another bullet point — You can’t explain why, but you feel forced to read this sentence. Your attention has been hijacked.

Here is some more text,

expressing only a singular idea,

that is

unnecessarily

separated by line breaks.

Is this not exhausting to read?

I like to call this type of writing “spaghetti writing”. Spaghetti writing is not bad per se: there are benefits to micro-optimizing the communication of certain ideas. However, you see it literally anywhere online. Most forms of writing on the worst social media sites longer than two sentences look like spaghetti writing. But social media was always meant for short-form content, so whatever. That was what you signed up for.

Suddenly, spaghetti writing is becoming more prominent outside of social media—inplaces on the Internet I didn’t sign up for. I used to be able to call Google search and GitHub safe havens for discovering technical authors who cared deeply about their craft. Now, to have the same opinion would be dishonest. LLMs are not only producing spaghetti writing, but subconciously teaching people spaghetti writing. Websites like Hacker News and Lobste.rs remain mostly high-quality, but the well is drying.

My ask to the reader is straightforward: the next time you want to write something meaningful, consider writing in contiguous paragraphs. Here is a brilliant guide on how to write a paragraph; I never understood what it meant to write a paragraph more than “it has a complete thought” and was never taught after grade school because I was always assumed to know how to write one. There is no shame in relearning how to do so. Experiment with pacing your writing and building up to a conclusion.

Always bet on text. Writing is the most powerful and intricate form of human expression; to be a great writer is to be human.

The first step towards a more literate digital culture is to learn how to write a paragraph.

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