To understand the future of writing, you need to understand its past. 

In ancient Greece, text could go from left to right or right to left, and was laid down in long blocks without interruption. There was just a short line or symbol to denote a change in speaker or passage (e.g. in a play).

Roman texts were not much easier to read, and the bunched-up, dense nature of text continued into the Middle Ages. 

It was only with the invention of typesetting (i.e. the printing press) that paragraphs - a block of text marked by an indent, and indicating a new idea or change of pace - became common.

Another evolution came with the typewriter. A quick double-tap on the return key gave you a line break. This extra white space between paragraphs was loved by newspaper editors. Then, with the rise of the internet, clear line breaks and no indenting became the online default.

The advantage of paragraphs is that they encourage writers to clearly separate ideas. For example, the ‘Schaffer paragraph’ (proposed by Jane Schaffer) gets school students to write paragraphs that are exactly five sentences long. 

The first line is factual (“Cinderella lives a miserable life”), the next three are detail (“She does all the cooking, cleaning, and sewing”) or commentary (“She feels taken advantage of by her selfish stepmother and stepsisters”). Then, a closing sentence (“She wants her life to change.”)

The paragraph enables a sense of flow and story. This is exactly what you want in fiction, but the paragraph is less ideal for non-fiction. Several ideas can be jumbled up together in a single paragraph. There can be a mixture of statement, commentary, and example. 

The dysfunctionality of the paragraph was noticed by Robert E Horn, a political scientist at Stanford University. Horn wondered: what if there was a rule that said a paragraph or a sentence could only contain one meaning? Then, they would start to become “information blocks”.  

Horn imagined the information block as a substitute for the paragraph. He pioneered a better form of technical manual and business document that was a lot understandable. Horn called it “structural writing”.