[yankeedame]

Oh, I never doubted that for a minute! (Sorry if I gave the impression that I suspected you have somehow "modified" the lay out of the article.) I was grouching at whoever originally wrote the article, and the editor who let is through.

[okie01]

"I was grouching at whoever originally wrote the article, and the editor who let is through."

That would be BBC.

Web editors, as a rule, have a loathing for long paragraphs. There is an unattributed suspicion that web readers are converts from TV and, thus, have short attention spans. It must be the video monitor vs TV set thing.

I'm a writer and, up to a point, I agree with them. I try to keep my paragraphs in compact four and five line groups -- just so that the format is more inviting, graphically. It is, by the way, also a good way to discipline your self-editing.

But some web editors (like this one, evidently) are incapable of distinguishing between the definition and purpose of a sentence vs a paragraph.