A reader asks:
Hi, Ben!
I was wondering, why do you use a longer line length than pretty much every other copywriter whose email lists I’ve subscribed?
I’m a beginner copywriter with only a couple of months of experience, but I think it was Joe Sugarman who said that a longer line length makes the readers eyes do more work and therefore is inferior to a shorter one.
What do you think of this?
What do I think of it?
I think that 8 or 9 years ago, I distinctly remember some people on twitter blaming me for the sudden rise of emails and tweets that were 100% made up of short, one line paragraphs that everyone nowadays – rightfully – hates, mocks, avoids reading today, even as more and more copywriters keep tripling down on plaguing their lists with them.
But I never once taught doing that with paragraphs.
I am a fan of contrast.
Contrasting sentences, paragraphs, etc.
So if anything, I use varying and contrasting paragraphs in size, shape, length which I first learned from studying emails written by the “High King of Email” himself Matt Furey. But copywriters are, overall, a rather copycat-obsessive & trend-enslaved group that usually miss nuance, and easily fall victim to marketing & copywriting incest.
It is probably why so many fap themselves blind to AI.
And since I’m getting more and more questions like this (I never used to get any, but over last few months I got several) about my longer lines and bigger paragraphs, maybe we can expect to see the rise of wall-of-text tweets – no line breaks or eye relief – from the above copywriters missing the nuance and point on that, too…
If that happens, only question is:
Will I get the credit… or the blame?
I guess time will tell.
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Ben Settle
