Open any book or magazine article. What do you see? Paragraphs! Paragraphs where you can easily tell where one ends and the next begins. It’s been this way for hundreds of years. That should tell you something.

It’s a physiological fact—the human brain is a lot better at reading stuff when it’s in discrete chunks. This is why there needs to be a clearly visible breakpoint between the beginning and end of your paragraphs. On ficlets, you do this by hitting enter twice at the end of a paragraph instead of once.

It costs an extra character, but pays such a dividend! Your story is much easier for people to read when it’s not one long block of text with some lines shorter than others. This means more people are likely to bother reading it—and following up or rating it, which might get you on the “Active” list. And you can easily pay for the extra characters by pruning just one or two unnecessary words—like “really” or “somewhat,” which are redundant even when you aren’t counting characters.