When I started out in design, a few years ago, looking for a job, I would craft my resume as a (design) work of art, just to be told that I should use bolds, bullets, underlines and all types of shebang! Being a minimalist, I didn’t think that you needed to shout to get your point across, but I was wrong. I was later told that most resumes were not actually read, but scanned for some keywords. Fast forward to web design. Coming from a graphic design background, I was conditioned to think that the graphic is the picture. But after a few years of failures, people told me that the search engines cannot read graphics, so your web site needs to be content-rich (text) to be relevant. I don’t like bullets, bolds, underlines, but I keep my paragraphs short for aesthetic reasons, so there’s visual separation that is pleasing to the eye. But I also keep usability in mind: column length, line height etc. Should we really obsess with what the experts say about how we should write copy? I think that the audience is smarter than we assume.

I agree writing needs to be kept pithy, short, terse, brief, and liberally sprinkled with subheads. Did I say short and to the point? Repeated studies have shown the people don’t like to read; they are task-driven and usually looking for a specific “kernal” of information. Sure, the audience is “smart,” but they are also impatient and busy. The information architecture should provide the user ready access to the information they seek, right down to the paragraph level.