Wall of Text: Difference between revisions

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If [[Speechbubbles Interruption]] are used to show it's not being listened to, see [[Wall of Blather]]. If the text is ''literally'' written on a wall in-universe, it might be a [[Room Full of Crazy]]. See [[Read the Fine Print]] if these kinds of text actually contain very important information. [[Ominous Multiple Screens]] is sort-of the video equivalent.

== Advertising ==

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** 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.

* 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.

* A dreadful example: ''[[Tintin]] in America''. Hergé shocked Europe with this thing. Now almost everyone knows text walls are ''pure evil.''

* A dreadful example: ''[[Tintin (Comic Book)]] 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".

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== 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.<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.

* 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.<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.

* 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.

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** ''[[Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal]]'' notes that [http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1538#comic "When people think 'funny', they think 'tons of words!'"]

* This is a criticism often levelled at ''[[Ctrl Alt Del (Webcomic)|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]].

** 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]].

* ''[[~~Eight~~ Bit Theater (Webcomic)|Eight Bit Theater]]'' does this a lot, like in [http://www.nuklearpower.com/2003/09/30/episode-336-elves-love-talking/ this] strip. Note the title of the strip itself. And yes, there are more extreme ones.

* ''[[8-Bit Theater (Webcomic)|Eight Bit Theater]]'' does this a lot, like in [http://www.nuklearpower.com/2003/09/30/episode-336-elves-love-talking/ this] strip. Note the title of the strip itself. And yes, there are more extreme ones.

* ''[[Goodwill Heroes]]'' had an instance where [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 (Webcomic)|Xkcd]]'' once had a wall of text that [http://xkcd.com/160/ broke the frame of the comic].

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* ''[[Silent Hill Promise]]'' The comic, like the [[Adventure Game|adventure games]] it apes, supplements the images with plenty of narration.

* ''[[Something Positive (Webcomic)|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]] [http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp07232004.shtml example] is lampshaded with the following:

{{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]].}}

{{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 (Webcomic)|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.

* ''[http://www.viruscomix.com/subnormality.html Subnormality]'' '''is''' walls of text (except when it's [[Text Plosion]]... Or totally wordless). It's right there in the sub-title: "Comix with too many words since 2007."

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* Though most walls of exposition are stowed away in boxes below the comic rather than panel bubbles, ''[[Homestuck (Webcomic)|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]] "[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 ~~Arms~~ Length (Webcomic)|At Arms Length]]'' as as [http://atarmslength.smackjeeves.com/comics/676446/deerwitchproject-28/ weapon against Ally].

* Once used in ''[[At Arm's Length (Webcomic)|At Arms Length]]'' as as [http://atarmslength.smackjeeves.com/comics/676446/deerwitchproject-28/ weapon against Ally].

* [[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.

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[[Category:Bad Writing Index]]

[[Category:Wall Of Text]]

[[Category:Trope]]

[[Category:Trope]][[Category:Pages with comment tags]]