”One observation we made is worth pulling out: Shorter paragraphs appear to greatly enhance the amount that people read on news website article pages.

Articles presented with short paragraphs (1-2 sentences) received, on average, more than double the eye fixations from our group of test subjects than articles with longer paragraphs. Shorter paragraphs simply encouraged reading; longer paragraphs discouraged it.”
Steve Outing: The Case for Shorter Paragraphs (2004)

”People focus primarily on the left third of the text in blurbs.

When blurbs are seen at all (as they were by about half the test participants who viewed our page with blurbs), viewing is primarily on the left third of the blurb.”
Steve Outing and Laura Ruel: Using Headline & Blurbs on News Homepages (2004)

”Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They'll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.”
Jakob Nielsen: F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (2006)

”Paragraphs set off chunks of prose visually. Since each paragraph looks like a different object, write it that way.

[...] on the Web, users are looking harder for clues about the content of each object before deciding to read [...].”
Jonathan and Lisa Price: Hot Text (2002), s. 184

”[…] on the Web – generally speaking – shorter is better. One of the handiest tools for the online writer is the word processor’s word-count function. Try it. Live by it. If you’re consistently writing paragraphs with no more than 50 words, you should probably lighten up. (The paragraph you’ve just read, at 47 words, is about the right length for the Web.)”
Gerry McGovern, Rob Norton & Catherine O’Dowd: The Web Content Style Guide (2002), s. 9