Boxed text in modules

I should be honest.  Shortly before writing my review of Hasken's Manor, I skimmed the blog headlines and read Courtney's post "On the Definitive Inadequacy of Boxed Text".  That partly explains why I took Brocius and Jindra to task for their lousy use of the device, but I might have done so anyway.

Almost every module has the stuff and I'm not prepared to complain about it in reviews every time I skim past it.  But for the record, I usually do skim past it.  The only notable exception in the Original Adventures series so far was Robert Wiese's charming Wreck Ashore - but even then, Wiese's boxed text is only used in a section of his adventure containing no encounters.  He's also very brief and direct in his descriptions.  For those reasons, the boxed content is somewhat useful to the DM.  I suspect that boxed text could also be used for areas that only contain traps, although the point Courtney raises about the human attention span does arise here.

I intend to review some of the excellent free material that's been generated by the OSR, so there should be cause to return to this point.