It never hurts to restate one's first principles, especially when new readers come along who don't know what all the fuss is about. Why is it better for the text of Scripture to be set in paragraphs instead of the traditional verse-per-line format? Why is a single column setting preferable to the much-more-common double-column arrangement? Does any of this really make a difference? For most of us, the meaty, controversial topic where Scripture is concerned is translation. How the words end up on the page is a matter of indifference. It seems trivial to lock horns over mere formatting when we could be grappling over Hebrew and Greek, or sparring about which English words in which combination are comprehensible to which English speakers. I understand. I find all that stuff fascinating, too. But there's something to be said for matters usually dismissed as superficial.
If you don't mind, I'll begin with a story. As a writer, I've been known to frequent what's called a "workshop." This is a regular get-together at a coffee shop or some other plausible venue, in which a group of authors trade photocopies of their work for purposes of critique. These manuscripts have never been eyeballed by an editor, so their formatting depends entirely on the author -- and these days, technology being what it is, a lot of manuscripts are passed back and forth electronically, losing formatting as they go. At one meeting, a writer passed out a stack of pages for discussion at the next meeting. I took them home and read them a few days later. To me, it looked like a rather long prose poem. Lines ended randomly but often in interesting ways, some paragraphs had extra space in between, while others were jammed up against each other. I wrestled with some of the stranger line endings, and giving the author the benefit of the doubt, assumed he'd undertaken something extremely subtle, something I couldn't quite figure out. But I tried, and eventually came up with a few pages of notes.
When we met, the first thing he did was apologize for the formatting. His short story (!) had been e-mailed back and forth, breaking the lines in odd places and adding lots of mysterious spacing he couldn't account for. Most of my commentary was based on the assumption that I was reading poetry. By re-formatting the lines, things became clear. The piece wasn't as difficult as I'd thought, but it wasn't as clever, either. I read it, yes, but I read into it, too. All because of a glitch in formatting.
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