Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Forum administrators, Interface administrators, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
116,199
edits
Wall of Text: Difference between revisions
m
replace redirect
No edit summary |
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) m (replace redirect) |
||
| (11 intermediate revisions by 4 users not shown) | |||
Line 17:
{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==▼
* The ''[[Death Note]]'' manga can be particularly guilty of this at times. In the later volumes of the manga, the characters spend a ton of time out-thinking each other in a 3-way cat-and-mouse game, and all of the text used for that can be jarring, even though it's essential. To make it worse, it's complex enough that, if you blink and miss a crucial detail, you're totally lost.▼
* As a self-styled modern day Sherlock Holmes, ''[[Detective Conan]]'' more often than not feature walls (and walls and walls) of text while [[Pull the Thread|pulling the thread]] to reveal who did it. [[Kindaichi Case Files|Kindaichi]] can be just as wordy, but he at least has the courtesy to break up his walls of text.▼
* ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'' often falls into this, and even plays this one for comedy once, having Yue go off on lengthy [[Expospeak]] tangents only to discover no one was listening.▼
** Hakase also goes into a long rant with a speech bubble the size of your fist filled with tiny writing where she babbles to herself about Chachamaru's emotions.▼
** Also when a scared-stiff Yue described the various impossibilities of the really, really big <s>dragon</s> wyvern that was just about to eat her and Nodoka, ending with, "wait, what am I saying?"▼
* [[Medaka Box]]'s Emukae has a ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20130605065553/http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/9705/hitow.png whole double page spread]'', consisting of 4 massive text bubbles the size of your hand, going on and on about how she wants to marry Hitoyoshi and have babies with him and have a nice big house and some pets and...▼
* The ''[[Moyashimon]]'' manga features truly stupendous examples every single volume, complete with shrinking [[Useful Notes/Fonts|fonts]], characters crowded into tiny gaps between speech bubbles, and explanatory notes in page gutters. These are usually Professor Itsuki indulging in a [[Character Filibuster]] about science, or more specifically fermentation.▼
* ''[[Liar Game]]'' is mostly a story about [[The Chessmaster|chessmasters]] who try to beat each other in different "games" to see who is the best [[Magnificent Bastard]]. To do so, they use [[Xanatos Gambit|gambits]] after [[Kansas City Shuffle|gambits]] based on game theories, psychology, economics, social studies and more. While they take the time to explain everything clearly, [[Viewers Are Geniuses|a certain knowledge of these subjects greatly helps to understand.]]▼
* [[Played for Laughs]] in a ''[[Soul Eater]]'' extra chapter (later adapted into an anime [[Breather Episode]]) with [[Ted Baxter|Excalibur]] giving another rambling story which takes up half a page that the author ''[[Breaking the Fourth Wall|specifically tells us]]'' to skip because it's [[Phrase Catcher|so annoying.]]▼
* ''[[Level E]]'' contains a couple examples of this. And yes, you have to read it all (or at least skim it) to understand the plot that is going on.▼
== Advertising ==
* [[Parodied Trope|Parodied]] in the Mac ad [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXiLCsbz9Hc Legal Copy] when PC starts making claims about his performance, causing a disclaimer to appear on-screen. Said disclaimer becomes bigger and bigger throughout the commercial, ending with PC saying "PCs are now 100% trouble-free!" causing the disclaimer to fill the whole screen.
== Comics ==▼
* The short-lived comic ''[[Warrior (Comic Book)|Warrior]]'', based on [[Professional Wrestling|pro wrestler]] The [[Ultimate Warrior]], was filled from cover to cover with walls of text, much of it consisting of incomprehensible, made-up jargon. Much of the text centers on Warrior's strange pseudo-philosophy that nearly makes [[Time Cube]] look sane by comparison. To see just how crazy and nonsensical it is, almost to the point it is hard to believe it could exist, see [[The Spoony Experiment]]'s [https://web.archive.org/web/20100414002104/http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/bt/spoonyone/reviews/7238-warrior1 review of it]. Making it worse was that sometimes it was printed in font colors that were unreadable on the background color. The sheer volume of text and its insane, babbling nature really can't be overstated here. There's a text box for the crazy narrator, a text box for "Warrior"'s crazy inner monologue, and ''then'' thought bubbles for "Warrior"'s crazy thoughts. It amounts to, at ''minimum'', a good 4-5 paragraphs per page...
** In the same tradition (though more tongue-in-cheek, obviously) Chris Sims of the Invincible super-blog does a feature he calls [http://www.the-isb.com/?cat=201 Warrior Wisdom Fridays] that feature one of Ultimate Warrior's characteristically incoherent Wall Of Text rants, plus a hilarious [[Alt Text]] haiku summary.
Line 27 ⟶ 38:
* A dreadful example: ''[[Tintin]] in America''. Hergé shocked Europe with this thing. Now almost everyone knows text walls are ''pure evil.''
* [[Don Rosa]]'s earlier works (particularly ''The Pertwillaby Papers'') had tight-packed expository speech bubbles. Not so much in his Disney comics, though; the "Disney remakes" of his stories are a good example of how one can thin the information flow without really affecting the ''net amount'' of information conveyed to the reader.
* The online archive of the surreal Brown University newspaper comic ''Burble'' is fully aware of its large bits of dialogue; despite its high quality compared to most other strips at the time, it was mocked (and later self-mocked) for "too many words".▼
* ''[[Peanuts]]'' once [http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j175/muzition/peanuts.jpg?t=1252462853 lampshaded] it by having Linus, after a vast amount of talk, comment to Charlie Brown that a contemporary complaint is that there's far too much talking and not enough action in comic strips.▼
* ''[[Mallard Fillmore]]'' often doesn't even draw the character's ''body'', instead crowding piles and piles of text around a floating disembodied head.▼
** ''[[This Modern World]]'' is the same.▼
* One issue of ''[[Howard the Duck (comics)|Howard the Duck]]'' was 22 pages of text-with-an-illustration of [[Steve Gerber]] apologizing for not having a fully-formed comic ready for publication that month.
* [[EC Comics]] had a pattern: the dialogue was put on the page before the artwork was. The writer would occasionally write his script directly onto the storyboards as he came up with it. This often meant that around 90% of the panel was pure text, with the art shoehorned into what was left. Some comics would end with a panel that was nothing ''but'' text to explain the story.
** The exception are the stories that [[Harvey Kurtzman]] drew, as well as the ones he wrote and storyboarded for other artists.
* ''[[The Thrawn Trilogy]]'' comic series doesn't quite go to those extremes, but since it's a ''very'' [[Compressed Adaptation]], there are quite a few pages full of text. [http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily/1130111.html Take a look].
* Jeremy "Norm" Scott's ''[[Hsu and Chan]]'' comics can get '''VERY''' wordy at times. While the walls scare off new readers, fans of the series will usually claim that Norm's style of humor justifies the intense word count. The comic's creator is aware of the wordiness of his comics and likes to joke about it constantly on his website.▼
{{quote|'''Norm:''' ''(about the issue ''Deep'')'' Oddly enough, nobody complained about the wordiness in THIS comic. It's possible nobody ever made it to the end.}}▼
* The comic adaptation of ''[[The Stand]]'' basically takes most of the narration from the [[Doorstopper|really long book]] and puts it in dialogue boxes over the action as it is happening.
* In ''[[Mafalda]]'', each time [[Gossipy Hens|Susanita]] starts telling gossip about the neighbours her speech bubble becomes a Wall of Text. On one occasion Felipe's body gets covered in text, until Manolito "saves him" by arriving and greeting them, breaking the flow of gossip.▼
* In ''[[Justice Society of America]]'', vol 3, issue 1, a wall of text is used to show ''[[Motor Mouth|just how much]]'' Cyclone talks.
* Parodied in ''[[Asterix]] as you have never seen him before''. Asterix delivers a barrage of verbiage that occupies three quarters of the panels and ends up putting Obelix to sleep.
* The problem has been endemic long enough in the comics industry to make famous one particular work offering a way to patch it: "[https://
* In a recent{{when}} interview, celebrated comic scribe [[Larry Hama]], a penciler turned writer, observed that the format of Marvel Comics' books in the 1970s and early 1980s was often guilty of this, bemoaning the overuse of captions. "You'd have a caption covering 3/4 of a panel, [[Narrating the Obvious|describing the content of the panel it was covering!]]"
* German comic ''[[Rudi]]'' is (in)famous for this and sometimes lampshades it.▼
* [[Justified Trope|Justified]] in ''[[American Splendor]]'', as the story is less about the pictures and more about character dialog and Harvey Pekar's inner monologue.
== Film ==
* In the documentary ''[[Crumb]]'', [[Robert Crumb]] flips through his brother's old amateur comics to show the brother's mental breakdown. With each page, the drawings become more and more pushed back by larger and larger bubbles crammed with text, until finally the drawings are discarded and Crumb is just flipping through page after page of microscopic text. It's quite creepy.
* The opening crawl of ''[[Alone in the Dark]]''.
== Literature ==
* [[Ye Olde
** A lot of this came from the fact that some works were published in periodicals, and the authors were paid by the word or line. The endless single sentence was usually a clever trick to avoid having their stories (and their paychecks) cut down, since cutting part of a sentence can be tricky.
* The novel ''The Rotter's Club'' has a sentence that is apparently [[Up to Eleven|13,955 words long.]]
* Most people's first impression of [[The Bible]].
* The book ''[[Ulysses]]'' ends with two sentences in its final chapter. The first one is 11,281 words long and the second is 12,931 words long.
* Nobel prize Jose Saramago loved to to this, do not try to imitate him, he got a nobel for a reason.
* The literary style of maximalism emphasizes the author writing down ''everything'' that crosses his/her mind in the interest of painting a more "complete" picture of the author's/character's mindset.
Line 65 ⟶ 66:
== Live-Action TV ==
* One ''[[Whose Line Is It Anyway?]]'' "Let's Make a Date" game gave Wayne a very complicated role to play (something pretty close to "smooth rap star blindfolded and tied to the bed by his girlfriend gradually realizing the night is going terribly wrong"). When Greg saw the card (about 8"x8"), his reaction was a stunned "There's two paragraphs of text on this!"
** The guessing-game personalities when ''Whose Line'' started in Britain were extremely simple ("a pirate," etc.), and gradually became longer and more convoluted over the next 18 seasons.
▲== Manga ==
▲* The ''[[Death Note]]'' manga can be particularly guilty of this at times. In the later volumes of the manga, the characters spend a ton of time out-thinking each other in a 3-way cat-and-mouse game, and all of the text used for that can be jarring, even though it's essential. To make it worse, it's complex enough that, if you blink and miss a crucial detail, you're totally lost.
▲* As a self-styled modern day Sherlock Holmes, ''[[Detective Conan]]'' more often than not feature walls (and walls and walls) of text while [[Pull the Thread|pulling the thread]] to reveal who did it. [[Kindaichi Case Files|Kindaichi]] can be just as wordy, but he at least has the courtesy to break up his walls of text.
▲* ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'' often falls into this, and even plays this one for comedy once, having Yue go off on lengthy [[Expospeak]] tangents only to discover no one was listening.
▲** Hakase also goes into a long rant with a speech bubble the size of your fist filled with tiny writing where she babbles to herself about Chachamaru's emotions.
▲** Also when a scared-stiff Yue described the various impossibilities of the really, really big <s>dragon</s> wyvern that was just about to eat her and Nodoka, ending with, "wait, what am I saying?"
▲* [[Medaka Box]]'s Emukae has a ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20130605065553/http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/9705/hitow.png whole double page spread]'', consisting of 4 massive text bubbles the size of your hand, going on and on about how she wants to marry Hitoyoshi and have babies with him and have a nice big house and some pets and...
▲* The ''[[Moyashimon]]'' manga features truly stupendous examples every single volume, complete with shrinking [[Useful Notes/Fonts|fonts]], characters crowded into tiny gaps between speech bubbles, and explanatory notes in page gutters. These are usually Professor Itsuki indulging in a [[Character Filibuster]] about science, or more specifically fermentation.
▲* ''[[Liar Game]]'' is mostly a story about [[The Chessmaster|chessmasters]] who try to beat each other in different "games" to see who is the best [[Magnificent Bastard]]. To do so, they use [[Xanatos Gambit|gambits]] after [[Kansas City Shuffle|gambits]] based on game theories, psychology, economics, social studies and more. While they take the time to explain everything clearly, [[Viewers Are Geniuses|a certain knowledge of these subjects greatly helps to understand.]]
▲* [[Played for Laughs]] in a ''[[Soul Eater]]'' extra chapter (later adapted into an anime [[Breather Episode]]) with [[Ted Baxter|Excalibur]] giving another rambling story which takes up half a page that the author ''[[Breaking the Fourth Wall|specifically tells us]]'' to skip because it's [[Phrase Catcher|so annoying.]]
▲* ''[[Level E]]'' contains a couple examples of this. And yes, you have to read it all (or at least skim it) to understand the plot that is going on.
== New Media ==
* Happens on [[The Other Wiki]] occasionally, more in the obscure-ish pages than others. Plot summaries can fall into this trap, especially if it gets overly detailed.
* RPers in text chat based media (SL, IRC, Instant Messaging,
▲== Print Media ==
* An audiophile magazine featured an article lamenting the overuse of compression—making the louds quieter and the quiets louder to even out the dynamic range of a recording. (There's even a term for it, it's "[[Loudness War]]".) Compression is useful for "punching up" the sound of a given track, since it evens out the dynamics and lets an engineer raise the volume without causing clipping. However, some modern recordings go a bit overboard with this. THE ARTICLE THEN PROCEEDED TO DEMONSTRATE THE PROBLEM OF EXCESSIVE COMPRESSION [[Self-Demonstrating Article|WITH A PARAGRAPH WRITTEN ENTIRELY WITH ALLCAPS AND AS FEW LINE BREAKS AS POSSIBLE.]] GIVEN THAT ALL CAPITAL LETTERS ARE THE SAME HEIGHT, IT MAKES FOR ONE LONG MASS OF LETTERS THAT BECOME HARD TO READ THROUGH AND TIRES THE EYE OUT FROM HAVING TO MENTALLY SORT IT OUT AND INSERT LINE BREAKS. SIMILARLY, COMPRESSING EVERYTHING TO DEATH ELIMINATES THE DYNAMIC INTERPLAY OF THE VARIOUS INSTRUMENTS AND CREATES A MUDDLE WHERE EVERYTHING IS LOUD BUT NOTHING STANDS OUT, LIKE SOMEONE SHOUTING OVER A STRONG WIND. DYNAMIC INTERPLAY IS A KEY PART OF A LISTENABLE RECORDING: MOST POP MUSIC RECORDINGS TEND TO FOCUS ON VOCALS FIRST, FOLLOWED BY MELODIC ACCOMPANIMENT AND THE RHYTHM SECTION IS UNDERNEATH IT ALL TO SERVE AS A FOUNDATION UPON WHICH THE REST OF THE SONG IS PLACED, AND IT SHOULD BE APPARENT YET UNOBTRUSIVE; TO DO OTHERWISE MAKES IT SOUND BAD. NEVERTHELESS, THIS TECHNIQUE IS [[Executive Meddling|APPARENTLY MANDATED BY SUITS AT THE LABELS]] WHO BELIEVE THAT, SINCE IT MAKES THINGS SOUND LOUDER, IT WILL MAKE THEIR SONGS STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD ON THE RADIO, SORT OF LIKE HOW TV COMMERCIALS ARE LOUDER THAN REGULAR PROGRAMMING. UNFORTUNATELY, THIS LINE OF THINKING HAS TWO MAJOR FLAWS: IT CREATES AN UNLISTENABLE AMORPHOUS BLOB OF AUDIO THAT PEOPLE DO NOT WANT TO HEAR AND [[Follow the Leader|WHEN EVERYONE ELSE DOES THE EXACT SAME THING, NOBODY'S UNLISTENABLE AMORPHOUS BLOB OF AUDIO STANDS OUT ABOVE ANYONE ELSE'S]]. The metaphor proved to be a bit ''too'' apt, as the magazine then received a ton of letters to the editor complaining that they couldn't read the article because it was, well, a wall of text.▼
* Textbooks. Some college texts books that are literally solid walls of text that go for pages with no pictures, diagrams, or even ''paragraph breaks''. And the text is usually really tiny.▼
▲* Manual pages for Linux/Unix commands are notorious for this.
* European Spanish magazines and newspapers tends to be more wordier than their Latin American counterparts, since Spaniards loves detailed explanations. On the other side, Mexican ones (with few exceptions) tends to be briefer and trying to get to the point faster than the Spaniard ones.▼
▲== Newspaper Comics ==
▲* The online archive of the surreal Brown University newspaper comic ''Burble'' is fully aware of its large bits of dialogue; despite its high quality compared to most other strips at the time, it was mocked (and later self-mocked) for "too many words".
▲* ''[[Peanuts]]'' once [http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j175/muzition/peanuts.jpg?t=1252462853 lampshaded] it by having Linus, after a vast amount of talk, comment to Charlie Brown that a contemporary complaint is that there's far too much talking and not enough action in comic strips.
▲* ''[[Mallard Fillmore]]'' often doesn't even draw the character's ''body'', instead crowding piles and piles of text around a floating disembodied head.
▲** ''[[This Modern World]]'' is the same.
▲* Jeremy "Norm" Scott's ''[[Hsu and Chan]]'' comics can get '''
▲{{quote|'''Norm:''' ''(about the issue ''Deep'')'' Oddly enough, nobody complained about the wordiness in THIS comic. It's possible nobody ever made it to the end.}}
▲* In ''[[Mafalda]]'', each time [[Gossipy Hens|Susanita]] starts telling gossip about the neighbours her speech bubble becomes a Wall of Text. On one occasion Felipe's body gets covered in text, until Manolito "saves him" by arriving and greeting them, breaking the flow of gossip.
▲* German comic ''[[Rudi]]'' is (in)famous for this and sometimes lampshades it.
== Video Games ==
Line 109 ⟶ 100:
* When [[Cloudcuckoolander|Rin]] in ''[[Katawa Shoujo]]'' starts rambling, it's shown in the largest and fullest textbox in the game. [[No Punctuation Period|With barely if any punctuation.]]
* In [[Minecraft]], due to the lack of usable books or notes (Until 1.3), most downloadable scenarios, public servers, etc. will leave introductory text written on signs attached to walls near the initial spawn point. This results in ''literal'' walls of text.
== Web Comics ==
Line 121 ⟶ 111:
* This is a criticism often levelled at ''[[Ctrl+Alt+Del|Ctrl Alt Del]]''. In fact, a certain [[Image Board]] came up with something called "CAD Rule"—the law that if you take the first panel and the last panel of a ''Ctrl+Alt+Del'' strip, remove the text from the last panel, and post it, it will automatically be much funnier, as [http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20060331 this strip] "shows".
** A similar device is the infamously named ''buckleybox'', a smaller but equally superfluous Wall of Text used to reiterate something that ''[[Don't Explain the Joke|should already appear in the actual comic]]'' visually, but may not due to odd dialogue placement, poor art not conveying it, or the assumption [[Viewers are Morons]].
* ''[[8-
* ''[[Goodwill Heroes]]'' had an instance where [https://web.archive.org/web/20120809170347/http://www.goodwill-heroes.net/06-06-2011/bk01-ch02-pg03/ the Librarian] belittled the main cast for raising their voices in a library.
* ''[[Xkcd]]'' once had a wall of text that [http://xkcd.com/160/ broke the frame of the comic].
* ''[[Dresden Codak]]'' has been accused of this ever since
* ''[[Triangle and Robert]]'' once had a main character killed by a Wall of Text exposition, [https://web.archive.org/web/20100712052858/http://tr.froup.com/tr.pl?785 here] and [https://web.archive.org/web/20100703134936/http://tr.froup.com/tr.pl?786 here].
* ''[[Silent Hill: Promise]]'' The comic, like the [[Adventure Game|adventure games]] it apes, supplements the images with plenty of narration.
* ''[[Something*Positive]]'' has a bad case of this; ironically this is more noticable since the comic is drawn to allow ample space from them, and is a good indication to the presence of strawmen. One particularly [[Egregious]] [
{{quote|'''Warning:''' The following comic contains a lot of words. Those who are frightened or intimidated by reading are encouraged to seek entertainment elsewhere. [[Viewers are Morons|We recommend a shiny ball of foil]].}}
* ''[[Irregular Webcomic]]'' made fun of this trope [http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1159.html here]. Notable that it use the strings of text as a way to make fun of the trope instead of having some sort of [[Lampshade Hanging]] outside the strings of text.
Line 143 ⟶ 133:
* ''[[Precocious (Webcomic)|Precocious]]'' [[Played for Laughs|plays this for laughs]]. It happens whenever Suzette goes into a rant (could be about anything from her [[Straw Feminist]] [http://www.precociouscomic.com/archive/comic/2009/03/24 philosophies] to [http://www.precociouscomic.com/archive/comic/2009/03/23 someone forgetting her name and believing it to be snobbery])
** It also uses [[Wall of Blather]].
* One of the many, MANY criticisms of ''[[Sonichu]]'', as elaborated on [
* In ''[[Pastel Defender Heliotrope]],'' [[Unicorn Jelly|and possibly every other Jennifer Diane Reitz work,]] everyone communicates via text walls. [[Up to Eleven|Every page, every panel, every word bubble.]] [[Rimshot|There are enough walls of texts in there to keep out Mongol invaders!]]
* [[Captain Obvious]] in ''[[The Way of the Metagamer]]'' combines these with [[Department of Redundancy Department]].
Line 149 ⟶ 139:
* Though most walls of exposition are stowed away in boxes below the comic rather than panel bubbles, ''[[Homestuck]]'' has more than its share of walls of text. The ''[[Lower Deck Episode|Hivebent]]'' arc, in particular, [[Word of God|has been described by Andrew Hussie as]] "[https://web.archive.org/web/20101209175525/http://www.formspring.me/andrewhussie/q/1158778979 a very vividly illustrated e-novel]", rather than a webcomic.
** In Act 6 Act 3, Homestuck [[Reconstructed Trope|actively defends its method of long-winded narration]] by having a new character who hates long stories tell her arc in bullet points and skip straight to the end, depriving the reader of almost all the interesting details. A second character, pissed off at this display of storytelling, decides to [[Call Back|recap the Ancestor Arc]] in the same bullet style, showing that while the initial version of that arc was fairly long-winded, the bullet-point style turns every character into a one-dimensional plot device and turns the narrative into a terribly-paced [[Random Events Plot]].
* Once used in ''[[At Arm's Length (webcomic)|At Arms Length]]'' as as [https://web.archive.org/web/20190630230700/http://
* [[Bleedman]], aka Vinson Ngo, is usually guilty of this in his webcomics when it comes to exposition. ''[[Grim Tales from Down Below|Grims Tales]]'' and ''[[Sugar Bits]]'' in particular.
== Web Original ==
Line 157 ⟶ 146:
* I have SuperNatural Wisdom. NO God mentality can Know my 4 Day Cube. No Bible Word equals my [[Time Cube|TimeCubed]] Earth. -- [https://web.archive.org/web/20131025083032/http://www.timecube.com/ Dr. Gene Ray, Cubic and Wisest Human]
* The posts that [[Sean Malstrom]] has on his blog tend to vary in length, but when they get long, they get ''long''. As in, upwards of 14,000 words. He sometimes posts several of these ''in one day''.
* ''[[The Black Sand Bar]]'', full stop. [http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/gaia-commerce/t.45961697_1/
* [[Geek Rage]] has this as its basic mode.
* The ''[[Global Guardians PBEM Universe]]'' was a set of email campaigns, and some of the player's were very enthusiastic participants. This happened a lot.
* The Onion's articles [http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation-shudders-at-large-block-of-uninterrupted-te,16932/ Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text] and [http://www.theonion.com/articles/frustrated-obama-sends-nation-rambling-75000word-e,18516/ Frustrated Obama Sends Nation Rambling 75,000-Word E-Mail]
* Video game blogger Tim Rogers is ''infamous'' for producing these, and in fact takes pride in it. If pressed to justify his extreme verbosity, his explanations vary from "it's just trolling" to "it's a legitimate style and you can take it or leave it".
== Western Animation ==
Line 168 ⟶ 156:
* Discussed in an episode of ''[[Chowder]]'' where the title character tries to publish a magazine whose cover cosists of one of these and is genuinely shocked to learn that a cover with a picture is more likely to attract potential buyers.
== Other Media ==
▲* An audiophile magazine featured an article lamenting the overuse of compression—making the louds quieter and the quiets louder to even out the dynamic range of a recording. (There's even a term for it, it's "[[Loudness War]]".) Compression is useful for "punching up" the sound of a given track, since it evens out the dynamics and lets an engineer raise the volume without causing clipping. However, some modern recordings go a bit overboard with this. THE ARTICLE THEN PROCEEDED TO DEMONSTRATE THE PROBLEM OF EXCESSIVE COMPRESSION [[Self-Demonstrating Article|WITH A PARAGRAPH WRITTEN ENTIRELY WITH ALLCAPS AND AS FEW LINE BREAKS AS POSSIBLE.]] GIVEN THAT ALL CAPITAL LETTERS ARE THE SAME HEIGHT, IT MAKES FOR ONE LONG MASS OF LETTERS THAT BECOME HARD TO READ THROUGH AND TIRES THE EYE OUT FROM HAVING TO MENTALLY SORT IT OUT AND INSERT LINE BREAKS. SIMILARLY, COMPRESSING EVERYTHING TO DEATH ELIMINATES THE DYNAMIC INTERPLAY OF THE VARIOUS INSTRUMENTS AND CREATES A MUDDLE WHERE EVERYTHING IS LOUD BUT NOTHING STANDS OUT, LIKE SOMEONE SHOUTING OVER A STRONG WIND. DYNAMIC INTERPLAY IS A KEY PART OF A LISTENABLE RECORDING: MOST POP MUSIC RECORDINGS TEND TO FOCUS ON VOCALS FIRST, FOLLOWED BY MELODIC ACCOMPANIMENT AND THE RHYTHM SECTION IS UNDERNEATH IT ALL TO SERVE AS A FOUNDATION UPON WHICH THE REST OF THE SONG IS PLACED, AND IT SHOULD BE APPARENT YET UNOBTRUSIVE; TO DO OTHERWISE MAKES IT SOUND BAD. NEVERTHELESS, THIS TECHNIQUE IS [[Executive Meddling|APPARENTLY MANDATED BY SUITS AT THE LABELS]] WHO BELIEVE THAT, SINCE IT MAKES THINGS SOUND LOUDER, IT WILL MAKE THEIR SONGS STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD ON THE RADIO, SORT OF LIKE HOW TV COMMERCIALS ARE LOUDER THAN REGULAR PROGRAMMING. UNFORTUNATELY, THIS LINE OF THINKING HAS TWO MAJOR FLAWS: IT CREATES AN UNLISTENABLE AMORPHOUS BLOB OF AUDIO THAT PEOPLE DO NOT WANT TO HEAR AND [[Follow the Leader|WHEN EVERYONE ELSE DOES THE EXACT SAME THING, NOBODY'S UNLISTENABLE AMORPHOUS BLOB OF AUDIO STANDS OUT ABOVE ANYONE ELSE'S]]. The metaphor proved to be a bit ''too'' apt, as the magazine then received a ton of letters to the editor complaining that they couldn't read the article because it was, well, a wall of text.
▲* Textbooks. Some college texts books that are literally solid walls of text that go for pages with no pictures, diagrams, or even ''paragraph breaks''. And the text is usually really tiny.
▲* European Spanish magazines and newspapers tends to be more wordier than their Latin American counterparts, since Spaniards loves detailed explanations. On the other side, Mexican ones (with few exceptions) tends to be briefer and trying to get to the point faster than the Spaniard ones.
== Real Life ==
Line 173 ⟶ 165:
** Here's a sample from one (imagine trying to read multiple pages of this): SUBJ: REVISED CUTTER FUEL INVENTORY REPORT REQUIREMENTS A. SUPPLY POLICY AND PROCEDURES MANUAL, COMDTINST M4400.19 1. PURPOSE: ACCURATELY REPORTING FUEL CONSUMPTION IS AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT TO ENSURING ALL OBLIGATIONS AND EXPENDITURES ARE RECORDED IN THE COAST GUARD FINANCIAL SYSTEM, A VITAL STEP IN ACHIEVING CFO AUDIT SUCCESS. THIS MESSAGE UPDATES THE STANDARDIZED FUEL REPORT MESSAGE FORMAT AND PROVIDES SUGGESTIONS TO REDUCE COMMON REPORTING ERRORS. IT ALSO ESTABLISHES NEW LINE ITEMS IN THE REPORT TO INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING MONTH'S ESTIMATED FUEL CONSUMPTION, WHICH WILL ASSIST IN IMPROVING THE ACCURACY OF COAST GUARD FINANCIAL STATEMENTS, END OF YEAR PIPELINE, AND CFO AUDIT COMPLIANCE. EVERY EFFORT WAS MADE TO ENSURE REPORTING REQUIREMENTS MINIMIZE, TO THE EXTENT POSSIBLE, IMPACT TO CUTTER WORKLOAD.
* Every last usage license agreement. Ever. Including the one that is the picture at the time of this writing.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20111107032741/http://www.adturds.co.uk/2010/11/tell-me-what-this-baffling-job-description-means.html The incoherent, babbling, jargon-filled mess that is the job description critiqued in this blog article,] and it isn't exactly helped by [[Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma|some of the worst grammar to ever exist in something that was supposed to attract people to the job]]: [[No Punctuation Period|three full stops in the entire block of text]], random capitalisation and abuse of apostrophes. This borderline [[Word Salad]] was more likely to have put people ''off'' applying than it was to generate recruits.
{{quote|Zola the Gorgon (commenter on blog): "I think someone wrote this ad by running a mission statement generator (e.g. http://www.isms.org.uk/mission... and [[They Just Didn't Care|cutting and pasting all the results into a solid block of text until they met their wordcount]]."}}
Line 179 ⟶ 170:
{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]▼
[[Category:Wiki Tropes]]
[[Category:Comic Book Tropes]]
[[Category:Bad Writing Index]]
▲[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
| |||