Personally, I upvoted this, but I will warn you that you may be getting an abnormal amount of downvotes, not because of the content, but because of the formatting. People around here are extremely picky about non standard formatting. I think that actually your current formatting is just fine and perfectly reasonable, but I am sure that there are some that will get annoyed by it. It’s slightly silly, but I do recommend that you change this to the standard formatting if you don’t want random downvotes.
Ok thanks for the heads up. I tried to change the formatting, but I’ve either made it worse or nothing has changed. How could I go about reformatting the post? Sorry from the not very computer literate.
I’ve fixed the formatting. You can do this by copy-pasting the text into the article editor from a plain text editor (that doesn’t support formatting) and then adding the necessary formatting (such as headings and italics) in the article editor. Alternatively, you can edit the HTML source by clicking “Edit HTML Source” button in the article editor, and remove all nonstandard formatting tags from there.
I’m going to snarkily suggest that LWers start reading articles via Screen Reader to reduce the relevance of formatting. It may or may not be possible to train such that text to speech can be understood faster than reading visually (I’ve only heard extremely vague anecdotes on this, but it’d be interesting to test).
For future reference, how does LW article formatting work, and what is standard? I physically can’t see to tell the difference if ever I find reason to post an article, and would rather avoid annoying people over something like that.
It may or may not be possible to train such that text to speech can be understood faster than reading visually (I’ve only heard extremely vague anecdotes on this, but it’d be interesting to test).
I don’t think this is likely. Standard human speech is about 150 wpm, and while people can get up to listening to at 2-3 times that, it takes significant practice. I get the impression that many more people can read at 300 wpm than can listen at 300 wpm, and so on up the scale.
Listening is also very unforgiving to attention lapses or sections that deserve careful thought, whereas when reading normally it is easy to pause or ‘rewind.’
For future reference, how does LW article formatting work, and what is standard?
My experience has been that composing articles on the “create new article” page leads to standard formatting, and that if you copy text in from another source you need to be careful to scrub it of formatting first. (One way that may work for that is to paste it into the html source, but that can lead to other problems. Copying it into a text file editor like notepad seems like a better approach.)
Personally, I upvoted this, but I will warn you that you may be getting an abnormal amount of downvotes, not because of the content, but because of the formatting. People around here are extremely picky about non standard formatting. I think that actually your current formatting is just fine and perfectly reasonable, but I am sure that there are some that will get annoyed by it. It’s slightly silly, but I do recommend that you change this to the standard formatting if you don’t want random downvotes.
Ok thanks for the heads up. I tried to change the formatting, but I’ve either made it worse or nothing has changed. How could I go about reformatting the post? Sorry from the not very computer literate.
I’ve fixed the formatting. You can do this by copy-pasting the text into the article editor from a plain text editor (that doesn’t support formatting) and then adding the necessary formatting (such as headings and italics) in the article editor. Alternatively, you can edit the HTML source by clicking “Edit HTML Source” button in the article editor, and remove all nonstandard formatting tags from there.
Thanks very much
I’m going to snarkily suggest that LWers start reading articles via Screen Reader to reduce the relevance of formatting. It may or may not be possible to train such that text to speech can be understood faster than reading visually (I’ve only heard extremely vague anecdotes on this, but it’d be interesting to test).
For future reference, how does LW article formatting work, and what is standard? I physically can’t see to tell the difference if ever I find reason to post an article, and would rather avoid annoying people over something like that.
I don’t think this is likely. Standard human speech is about 150 wpm, and while people can get up to listening to at 2-3 times that, it takes significant practice. I get the impression that many more people can read at 300 wpm than can listen at 300 wpm, and so on up the scale.
Listening is also very unforgiving to attention lapses or sections that deserve careful thought, whereas when reading normally it is easy to pause or ‘rewind.’
My experience has been that composing articles on the “create new article” page leads to standard formatting, and that if you copy text in from another source you need to be careful to scrub it of formatting first. (One way that may work for that is to paste it into the html source, but that can lead to other problems. Copying it into a text file editor like notepad seems like a better approach.)