On (Not) Wallposting

Original Lecture: On (not) wallposting

A helpful hint--it's not so much that you need to stop wallposting.

It's that you need to format your walls in a way that encourages people to actually read them. For instance, as much as people joke about not reading my posts, the simple matter of the fact is, most actually do. (Granted. Reading and comprehending are two entirely different things; if they actually comprehended my posts, I'd lose games a whole heck of a lot less. :P)

I can't really give good advice on how to improve that. It's one of my weakest aspects to my play. But it's still something that I can do better than most. (People are more inclined to read a wall written by me than by most other people.) And it's mainly because my walls have good flow to them. They transition from one point to another fairly smoothly, and are broken up neatly into nice, easily-readable sections that are not hard to digest.

In addition to having flow between paragraphs and nice guiding thoughts (for instance, bold headers in my MD articles that give the core message of the following point), I also try to format the paragraphs to be reasonably-lengthed. They're not super-short one or two liners. They're also not typically beyond six or seven lines at MOST, because that creates a solid block of text too hard to read in one go. 3-5 is the nice butter-zone of paragraph length. And while I realize that varies with screen resolution, it is something I try to do my best with.

Now that said! You can also wall less if you try. As kuribo said, sometimes, it's as simple as posting as soon as you've completed your thought! Typically, I caution a person who wants to avoid spamposting to make sure the thought is actually completed before hitting submit, as to make sure there's nothing additional needed for that thought. So look your thought over, see if there's anything about it you want to change, and only after thinking about it for a few seconds (or even minutes) do you hit submit. This crucial bit of thought-editing makes all the difference.

In short, both of these have the same factor--that thought process organization.

The key to making people read what you write (be it wallposting or spamposting) is to have your train of thought be easily traceable and to flow, with it being organized, neat, and overall, refined. You might not notice it, but my posts actually go through a lot of editing. What I post isn't my first draft, but is typically my third or even fourth draft. That crucial bit of editing makes worlds of difference, and it's the best way I've found for me to get what I want.

As an added bonus...typically, this editing process cuts down on words used as well, making your wall...a little bit less of a wall! (I realize you were most likely joking, but walling is a serious problem that many users have, and this is a lesson written to help them curve those problems.)

Good luck!