Why don’t writers indent paragraphs anymore?

The offering was pertinent, topical and practical. I learned a lot of what I expected to learn; the title was descriptive and accurate. So, what’s my beef?

The paragraphs were indented. Yes, old-school indented. Like all the papers I wrote in college in AP style. Like all my high school themes. Like my handwritten letters to my children that I wrote when they were babies, more than 20 years ago.

It was jarring, really. Super distracting. Most of the digital content I read is not indented. Blog posts. Newspaper website articles. White papers, Facebook entries, emails, tweets. All of them flush left, otherwise known as “block style.”

What I’m trying to remember is—when did indenting become so old-fashioned that it now hurts my eyes to look at it? After a little sleuthing I think I have found the origins of this trend, and I wanted to share my findings.

Back in the Middle Ages, paragraphs were first denoted by a little symbol called the pilcrow: ¶. You might recognize it if you’ve ever done any tedious editing in the “track changes” mode in Microsoft Word. Then, as our language evolved, the pilcrow was dropped and the space it used to occupy was left over—a vestigial tail now known as the “indent.”