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"Writing designed for the web"? You're firmly in Bullshit Central if that's your mindset. No good writing is ever designed past a point. Novelists, essayists,

"Writing designed for the web"? You're firmly in Bullshit Central if that's your mindset. No good writing is ever designed past a point. Novelists, essayists, journalists, all have a distinct style. Most of them break all the rules there are. Online, there's an even huger difference, even in similar fields. Jason Kottke versus Andy Baio. FiveThirtyEight versus Andrew Sullivan. Nobody sounds the same. That's the point. Do you want Copyblogger? "Make bullet points, bold words to emphasize, write short paragraphs, include five links in every sentence, include a picture of a naked woman with lolspeak written above?" Because all you'll learn is that there's no such thing as a "salient feature" of writing. There's writing, and different people do different things, and some people like certain kinds of writing more than other. Some people write paragraphs with a few hundred sentences, and people read their stuff because it's good. Other people write in very sparse shorthand. It's all allowed, and it's often all good.

Alex3917 17y ago
I understand that there are a wide variety of acceptable writing styles. That said, there are many literary devices and techniques that wouldn't have been possible without the Internet. And, when writing for the Internet, it often makes sense to incorporate these as they tend to improve one's writing.
- zimbabwe 17y ago
  "Literary devices and techniques?" Do you mean... hyperlinking? Because there's nothing else that's been done online that wasn't done previously in other mediums.
  - twopoint718 17y ago
    I'll offer Michael Joyce as an example: http://faculty.vassar.edu/mijoyce/ http://faculty.vassar.edu/mijoyce/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afternoon:_a_story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afternoon:_a_story I think you could consider this a use of hyperlinking before the web. And if you count "As We May Think", then it is a use way before the web. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
    - zimbabwe 17y ago
      Very cool stuff! I knew of Joyce, though I've never read Afternoon (I'm worried it won't meet expectations), but As We May Think I'd never heard of before.
      - twopoint718 17y ago
        After I heard about him, I went to my campus library and checked out "Afternoon." It comes on one 3.5" floppy disk and couldn't be removed from the reading room. So I sat down (at the only machine left with a floppy drive) and clicked through it for about an hour. It is certainly very different from a usual novel. For starters you have no idea how long it is. Hyperlinks aren't highlighted as we've come to expect and so I have to admit that I was doing some Myst-style random clicking at times. You'll often get back to the same paragraph but through a different path, these paragraphs are usually written in such a way that they would make sense by any path that you'd arrived at them.

Alex3917 17y ago

I understand that there are a wide variety of acceptable writing styles. That said, there are many literary devices and techniques that wouldn't have been possible without the Internet. And, when writing for the Internet, it often makes sense to incorporate these as they tend to improve one's writing.

zimbabwe 17y ago
"Literary devices and techniques?" Do you mean... hyperlinking? Because there's nothing else that's been done online that wasn't done previously in other mediums.
- twopoint718 17y ago
  I'll offer Michael Joyce as an example: http://faculty.vassar.edu/mijoyce/ http://faculty.vassar.edu/mijoyce/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afternoon:_a_story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afternoon:_a_story I think you could consider this a use of hyperlinking before the web. And if you count "As We May Think", then it is a use way before the web. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
  - zimbabwe 17y ago
    Very cool stuff! I knew of Joyce, though I've never read Afternoon (I'm worried it won't meet expectations), but As We May Think I'd never heard of before.
    - twopoint718 17y ago
      After I heard about him, I went to my campus library and checked out "Afternoon." It comes on one 3.5" floppy disk and couldn't be removed from the reading room. So I sat down (at the only machine left with a floppy drive) and clicked through it for about an hour. It is certainly very different from a usual novel. For starters you have no idea how long it is. Hyperlinks aren't highlighted as we've come to expect and so I have to admit that I was doing some Myst-style random clicking at times. You'll often get back to the same paragraph but through a different path, these paragraphs are usually written in such a way that they would make sense by any path that you'd arrived at them.