On paper, on screen

Writing this web site has been an illuminating experience so far, and I imagine that there is much more illumination to come. The software available means that the kind of text possible, and therefore the kind of thinking required, is different in some significant respects from writing on paper. Paper supports ordinary text - the screen supports hypertext.

All writing is like a thread that lies, folded into lines, on the two-dimensional page. Of course, the thread offers all kinds of invisible weaving and crochet - words refer to the real three-dimensional world, memory loops the thread back on itself with cataphora and anaphora (forward-referencing and backward-referencing, if you prefer), and the text as a whole ends up as some kind of complicated knot in our mind. This text works like that at the moment.

But writing for the screen attached to a website makes such weaving and knotting rather more actual and deliberate, to some extent, through the techniques available. You can insert links to other parts of your site or to the internet in general with all its vast, chaotic resources. Or there is hover text  ... (putting the cursor on the blue words takes you to Another Dimension!). You can call up videos, music, images (if the right ones are actually available, of course) ... which include the fourth dimension.

And finally, there is the curious sense that the text is alive - it never has to be finished, or be nailed down and sent off to be buried ... sorry, printed. 

More on this in the page Writing for screen , inside ... see what I mean?