Go ¶huck Yourself

I'm in a ranty mood.

You know what I hate? The use of the pilcrow (paragraph sign, ¶) as a design element. Often in magazines, articles will begin with a block of text that's in bigger type than the rest of the piece. If the part of the story filling that block is more than one paragraph long, instead of using a line break and an indent as usual the designer will keep the text flowing but stick a pilcrow in there.

There are several reasons to stop this. First, it's an ugly, elaborate character, especially for what it does. Use a pipe or a bullet (| or •) or some other arbitrary symbol, as long as it's clean.

Second, it's too explicit. The reader shouldn't stop to think, even subconsciously for a few milliseconds, "Oh, that symbol looks like a backwards P with an extra leg, and P stands for paragraph, and they're telling me that they're starting a new paragraph here." No, don't spell it out. Keep it simple. Again, any subtle visual cue would work. Did I mention the bullet?

Third, it just looks like someone forgot to turn "display formatting" off. Stop being meta and trendy.

Why do I have so much anger?