TYPOGRAPHY
Much of today's printing is set up in sans serif typeface. The serif is the little tail which is attached to Roman face letters at the beginning and the end of each letter. Books and newspapers are nearly always set in serif typefaces such as Times Roman. This is a fairly new face which was designed for newspapers. The serifs help the eye to move quickly along the line of letters with clarity of identity. It also packs into a narrow newspaper column.
With familiarity we scan just the top half of the first 3 or 4 characters, recognising the word in its context with the whole sentence. Often we need to know whether the noun is singular or plural. It would be much easier if the letter "s" was placed at the beginning of the word to save the eye movement on to the end.
The Roman face is a descendant of the characters incised in stone over 2000 years ago. The serif was essential to terminate the strokes of the letters. However we have been conditioned to reading serif type faces with more speed and accuracy than the sans serif faces such as in this site, and it is increasingly used in advertising and architectural publications, because it looks "modern" and "cool". The demands of function do not seem to apply.
Further, for clarity of reading the line should not exceed about 40 characters in length, as the eye movement from the end of one line to the beginning of the next takes more time if the line is long, as we try to avoid re-reading the previous line. The space between words needs to be no greater than the width of the letter "e", which again helps the eye to move quickly and with accuracy. It is easy to read in the setting in this article that the eye is not traversing the story as quickly and with the same degree of accuracy as we find in quality books. It is also eating up unnecessary space on the web site. Further, the waste of a whole line in the space between paragraphs slows our reading and is uneconomical.
The excess space would be better spent in the page layout. But this is determined by the screen width. A page in a book which is set out with generous space and a clear Roman typeface is a pleasure to read. Most people would be familiar with the name Eric Gill. He was a typographer who was commissioned by the London Transport Board to design a useful typeface which could be easily copied by signwriters and used in printing of all publications. Gill Sans is the familiar face of everything produced by the Board and, like a logotype (logo to you) identifies the organisation. Eric Gill also designed a Roman typeface, "Perpetua," which is lighter than Times New Roman, which is probably the default typeface in your computer. Perpetua is a delight to read in a block of type. If you have it in your font on your computer change it to your default type and see how it compares, page for page with Times New Roman. While you are about it, also change your default for "style" to "Book" which gives a shorter space between paragraphs. However, if you are compiling a list you must go back to "Normal" style.