By “bittiness” I mean that the downside of splitting things up into short paragraphs, bullet points, tables, etc., is that the reading experience becomes less “smooth” and more “jerky” somehow. More an aesthetic than a practical thing, though there are practical aspects too. For instance, when you split paragraphs up more, the same material takes up more space, which means you can’t see as much of it at once, which means more load on the reader’s working memory. For another instance, sometimes you want structures with a couple of levels of nesting, and making that nesting visible via new paragraphs or bulleted lists may require multiple levels of indentation, which requires either that the “inner” text be very narrow and therefore hard to read or that the “outer” text be very wide and therefore hard to read.
In general, though, I’m a fan of splitting things up to make their logical structure more visible, and I think you’re correct that in this case I should have listened more to that particular inner voice. (In particular, the example downsides I listed don’t really apply; the fiddly bits of what I wrote weren’t that long, and as your proposed rewrite shows it’s possible to indicate the outer-level structure via boldfaced heading lines or similar.)
By “bittiness” I mean that the downside of splitting things up into short paragraphs, bullet points, tables, etc., is that the reading experience becomes less “smooth” and more “jerky” somehow. More an aesthetic than a practical thing, though there are practical aspects too. For instance, when you split paragraphs up more, the same material takes up more space, which means you can’t see as much of it at once, which means more load on the reader’s working memory. For another instance, sometimes you want structures with a couple of levels of nesting, and making that nesting visible via new paragraphs or bulleted lists may require multiple levels of indentation, which requires either that the “inner” text be very narrow and therefore hard to read or that the “outer” text be very wide and therefore hard to read.
In general, though, I’m a fan of splitting things up to make their logical structure more visible, and I think you’re correct that in this case I should have listened more to that particular inner voice. (In particular, the example downsides I listed don’t really apply; the fiddly bits of what I wrote weren’t that long, and as your proposed rewrite shows it’s possible to indicate the outer-level structure via boldfaced heading lines or similar.)