Every new system for transmitting text leads to innovations in formatting and style.
We forget sometimes, but Gutenberg’s press helped to invent the clever little unit of writing called the paragraph. Before the printing press, most text continued without interruption, page after page. Which was OK at the time, since monks and scholars had few distractions and plenty of time to focus. No chirping iPhones or noisy neighbors for them.
The Internet has introduced three major innovations in style — the space between paragraphs, the hyperlink, and now the in-text footnote. Each innovation makes reading easier for the attention-challenged citizen of the 21st century. Let’s look at them in turn.
Double-spacing between paragraphs: For centuries, paragraphs have been marked off with an indentation. If you want to start a new stream of thought, you indent by three to five spaces. You could just hit the space bar three to five times. For you could set the tab key to move in as many spaces with just one whack of a key. Computers allow us to set the indentation for a whole manuscript at the top of the file.
But people using the Internet tend to be more rushed. Reading on a computer screen causes some eye strain, to say nothing of the hunched-over feeling while reading on a laptop of desktop machine. Internet readers are constantly tempted to click away from the text, not only by hyperlinks and ads and embedded video, but also by the cacaphony that is modern life.
Double spacing between paragraphs creates enough white space for the reader to find her place after getting pulled away for a moment. White space is also visually pleasing.
People in business and government had already started to double-space between paragraphs before the Internet. They understood that their text was often bland and clunky and that the reader was usually distracted. So they printed reports and memos with the white space between grafs.
White space has a tendency to reinforce the telegraphic pace of writing. Sure, we often write long paragraphs with white space. But seeing paragraphs as separated units reinforces our tendency to skim rather than dive in for a deep read.
Hyperlinks: Before the Internet, of course, the very idea of hyperlinks was just a fantasy. Who could have imagined being about to jump from what you’re reading to a completely different document or video in an instant? Maybe Alvin Toffler and a few other futurists, but the idea never occurred to me until it started happening. And, in fact, the early web used few hyperlinks. Now they’re everywhere.
Hyperlinking was actually first imagined by Vannever Bush, way back in 1945. Writing in The Atlantic, he mused: “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.” But it took computers and the World Wide Web to make hyperlinks part of everyday literary reality.
Hyperlinking, like most innovations, can produce either positive or negative effects. On the one hand, it’s nice to get instant answers to questions as you move through a text. When did Bobby Thompson hit that home run? How long was Shackleton marooned in Antarctica? Who discovered the dendrite? It’s also nice to get instant definitions for words, as today’s ereaders provide as a matter of course.
On the other hand, these hyperlinks can make us distracted. Sometimes, the best way to explore a new subject is to make sense of ideas through context. When we click off to another text, we lose the sense of immersion. That’s a huge loss. Not only do we lose the ability to plunge into a great text, but we also lose the ability to figure things out for ourselves. All meaning, as Wittgenstein taught us, is contingent. We lose that sense of context when we move away from a text, again and again.
The in-text footnote: If you read Joe Posnanski, the entertaining writer for Sports Illustrated, you know what I’m talking about. JoePo — not to be confused with JoePa, about whom JoePo is writing a biography — regularly skips off the subject for historic or philosophical asides. Sometimes you want to read these asides, and sometimes you don’t. The effect, as I imagine JoePo hopes, is a conversational style.
Conversation is a funny thing. Sometimes you want to follow every stray thought your partner pursues; sometimes, you wish he’d just get to the point. This is an example of the in-text footnote.
Of course, Posnanski could hyperlink to an aside. But then you’d get pulled away from the main text. You could also use a sidebar. But then the aside would not feel like part of the story. So JoePo uses the in-text footnote. I like it, especially for more informal writing. I also think it would work great for “serious” news, on topics ranging from Iraq to Newt.
These innovations democratize writing and reading. They make it easier for ordinary folk — as opposed to use serious, professional writers — to express themselves. I support anything that democratizes such an important activity. But it’s easy to get sloppy. Using white space between paragraphs, for example, doesn’t do anything to improve the quality of the paragraph. It just creates a visible moment to pause. And hyperlinks and in-text footnotes can create needless distractions.
Let’s give Aristotle, who lived two and a half millennia ago, the final word on this 21st-century conundrum. Do everything in moderation, he said. Avoid the extremes. Fit the practice to the challenge at hand.
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