They'd look at me with eyes big and circular as a satellite dish, large enough to fully capture my intense beam of literary wisdom. They'd do this because they're a figment of my imagination. But seriously, this is a problem. Not enough people know how to use the return key properly.

Most of us have received that e-mail, you know the one, the late-night stream-of-consciousness rant about a bad relationship or a crap job or about how their life should have turned out so much better. They just started typing into a box, drunk most probably, and they didn't stop until true catharsis let them finally hit "Send." On the receiving side, it starts looking like this after a few sentences.

You don't have to read the whole thing, you know what the gist is. But you can always keep from looking like an insensitive twat by responding with this:

bro. i feel you.

But bloggers have no excuse, and neither does anyone who's communicating with more than one person at a time through asynchronous means. This is a computer screen, and it's painful enough to be blasted with bright lights for long periods -- 50-line paragraphs are hot-coal walks for our eyes. I don't understand this, because a lot of the people who write thick grafs are very bright academic-types with advanced degrees and gigantic vocabularies, they just lack organization skills. Or they're teenagers writing in their LiveJournals. It's the one thing that brings these two groups together.

Seriously, throw in a line break or two, it benefits all of us. The return key can turn a shitty writer into a good one -- it worked for me, and it can work for you. It's the "return" key because proper use of it means a financial return, see? It makes you a better writer, and gets you real paid. Some people might have an "enter" key instead. It's what enters you into the realm of the super-writers.

Now that's a lot of responsibility, Spiderman. A line break is a breath the reader takes, and the writer gets to decide exactly when and how often that happens. That's the next-best thing to controlling whether your readers live or die.

Watch out, though. The return key, like any powerful object, can be abused. Don't be like those opinion-driven sportswriters, you know the ones.

It couldn't have happened this way. It just couldn't have.

It happened. The scoreboard proved it.

But did it really happen? Really?

Opinion-driven sportswriters do this because it allows their columns to look a lot longer than they really are. It's not their fault that the market is this way -- there are deadlines to meet, and thousands of readers who demand something, anything about the game moments after it's over. Opinion-driven sportswriters don't care that there are snarky bloggers who make fun of them. They stopped caring about their legacies a long time ago. They're getting real paid.

But you don't have a deadline, and it's more than likely you're not getting real paid, so you don't have to emulate these guys and write this way. In five years or so, researchers will point to the Blackberried opinion column as the thing that killed sports journalism forever, so save your potential career while you can.

Use the return key, but use it in moderation. Just make sure you use it. Three or four sentences per paragraph is a good rule of thumb. Anything over 15 is throwing your readers into a pit of quicksand and expecting them to thank you for it.

Thank you.

Have a good weekend.