So... What's with all the Pictures?

You might have noticed that I use a lot of photographs here... and they are not "stock photography" or even directly related to what I am writing about.

Why do I do that?

It's a readability thing. And when it's hard for you to focus, large blocks of text can become challenging to read. People with ADD/ADHD are notorious "skippers" and "skimmers."

When I started keeping this blog, I spent some time thinking about "how" I read text... and what kinds of texts feel "easy" to read, and what kinds of text feel "difficult" to read.

I came to realize that I like "picture books," or at least illustrated books... and web pages... because the images tend to break up long pieces of text. It's nothing more than a "mind trick," of course... but it does work, at least for me.

My little short span of attention "thinks" something like "Yeah, I can read to the top of that picture. Then I can look at the picture, Then I can read to the bottom of the picture. Then I can look for the next picture. Then I can focus on the text to there..." and so on.

Since this blog and web site is mainly written with people with ADD in mind... it seems only reasonable that I don't present my contents here as an endless dissertation of featureless text.

I am also trying to keep the posts here reasonably short, also for readability purposes.

As a writer, I am often writing articles and papers that are 1500, 2000, 3000 words and even longer. Given what "ails" us, these pages will generally be written in a pretty "short" format, with very few posts getting much above 600-800 words-- that's a short-to-medium length article, in a newspaper or magazine.