Wall of Text: Difference between revisions

[[File:wall_of_text_1664wall of text 1664.gif|frame|[[Memetic Mutation|Too Long; Didn't Read]]]]

In practice, a writer can get too caught up in all the things they have to say and fail to organize it all into bits an ordinary human being would be able to digest. The end result is a huge run-on paragraph that makes it difficult to recall the original point of it, if there was one in the first place. The reader's eyes glaze over and all they see is a [['''Wall of Text]]'''.

At best, a [['''Wall of Text]]''' is just a signal of really heavy exposition. At worst, they are a warning sign that the author is [[Author Filibuster|soapboxing about something]].

* Dave Sim's ''[[Cerebus]]'' went beyond the [[Walls of Text]] and into chronic [[Author Filibuster]] when the comic itself was repeatedly put on hold to make space for multi-page misogynistic rants of plain text. It does get over that phase eventually,<ref> the walls of text, not the misogyny</ref>, then later falls back into it.

* An audiophile magazine featured an article lamenting the overuse of compression -- makingcompression—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.<br />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]].<br />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.

* If you make a rather wordy post on the ''[[City of Heroes]]'' forum, some people will complain they were killed by your wall of text. Some [[Troll|Trolls]]s will engage in wall of text contests to see if they can overload the forum display.

* 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—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]].

* ''[[The Order of the Stick|Order of the Stick]]'' actually played this one staggeringly straight [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0282.html in this comic]. Though it ''did'' throw in [[Lampshade Hanging]]: Vaarsuvius, king (or queen) of overtalking, complains about the brevity -- whenbrevity—when you think about it, [[Fridge Brilliance|really quite a valid complaint in a trial]].