Are people shooting themselves in the foot...

Those people need to study the English language again, as they have forgotten the need for paragraph spacing, and where it fits in.

I know people who speak perfectly fluent English, yet they still don't even know what a semicolon is for, nor do they completely understand how to use commas either.

Of course, I am not perfect, however I do try to make my writing readable, by doing such.

Also, the people who write as you (the OP) stated, I also believe they are just writing everything how it sounds in their head, forgetting to also put the breaks, stops, and pauses as they would flow 'in the head' as well.

I know about grammar & spacing, however when I write on my blog, a forum post, whatever, I try to limit each 'paragraph' to just a few lines each.

Even when it should technically be 1 paragraph, I still try to break things up. People dont like having to decipher these giant walls of text.

I think you are correct to a degree. Those same people probably wonder why they can't make any money or get sign ups either.

I guy asked me to review his site and frankly, had he not asked me to look at it, I would've bounced off the minute I bounced on.

When I gave him my opinion, which he asked for remember, he defended every part of it and didn't change a thing.

Then two weeks later he comes back to me and wants to know why he isn't making any money because his site is so much better than most because of the content.

LOL

They're not forgetting. You have to know something to forget it.

Most people don't know how to express themselves effectively. We've made it very easy for people to express themselves on the internet, but since they don't know how, it doesn't make their expressions any better.

Not so long ago, publishing your opinions on the internet largely involved being the sort of person who wanted to publish opinions enough to learn how.

But now we've lowered the bar to the point that a sixteen year old girl can text "I like tapioca LOL" from her high school cafeteria and it shows up simultaneously on Tumblr, Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

So those of us who used the internet all these years to avoid that kind of pointless and banal conversation have now lost our safe haven, right?

WRONG!

- Don't follow this person on Tumblr or Twitter
- Don't friend this person on MySpace or Facebook
- If you have done either of those things, go undo it

Now you are largely safe from that person's general idiocy.

What people who complain about these things are really complaining about isn't that the world is so full of mouth-breathers (which it is), but that it is so hard for them to find rational sensible people they can follow and friend.

This is mostly because the mouth-breathers have discovered SEO, and now all our search results are crap.

So we have to network manually with people who don't suck, and get referrals from them to other people who don't suck.

Which is exactly what people like us did before the internet.

The world isn't horrible. It's gotten a lot easier for people to find other people. We had this short period of time that it was trivial to find other smart, technical people... but that's over. Live with it. We're still better off than the days finding those people required multiple hours of long distance charges.

If the text grabs the reader's attention and draws him in, then it is successful and that is what matters.

While I am all for "Proper" English in the books I read, the rules are more liberal when trying to grab online eyes. So my paragraph is made up of one sentence, so what? Is my English teacher going to track me down? Not likely.

Two other points: write with an active voice and put your best material first. The first makes for more compelling copy and the second insures that everybody who reads any part of your page sees the strongest material.