In the Surreal story thread in MPSIMS, Hastur urged me to use “carriage return” when composing theads, which, from Hastur’s own postings and those of several other Dopers, suggests that I am being asked to use blank spaces between paragraphs; that is, if I were using an old-fashioned typewriter, to return the carriage twice between the last line of one paragraph and the first line of the next one.
Is there an advantage to doing this? When I was writing compositions in high school and college, I never separated paragraphs with blank lines; and typing teachers–and instructors in word-processing courses I took in college–never asked me to do this.
Is there a specifc advantage to the style Hastur suggests? 
It creates a visual break. If we had an option to tab to indent the first line of a paragraph, that would be a valid way to go, too, but if you are typing a long block of text, even it if it is broken in to paragraphs, it will still look like a long block of text if you do not provide the reader with some sort of visual break between them.
Hope this helps.