Review

Writing Hypertext

Creating a Layout

Building with Integrity

Today's Assignment

Hypertext Workshop

  Writing Hypertext

Some Reminders
Always remember the basic rule of writing in hypertext: the purpose of this style of writing is to bring ever richer content more easily and imaginatively to your readers. Content creates a successful hypertext.

In writing hypertext, your writing space is the screen, not the page. The screen is an entirely different shape (wider than it is long) to the page (longer than it is wide). Plan your writing accordingly.

Your paragraphs build into text blocks, not pages. Those text blocks are joined not by the turning of a page but by the dynamic action of a link. One page of text literally erases its predecessor on the screen.

Some Suggestions
Like a conventional essay, a hypertext presentation requires planning. A collection of pages randomly linked together provides neither pleasure nor enlightenment for the reader. Nor will it allow you, as thinker and writer, to transmit all your ideas fully to the reader.

The text block is a relatively small unit of text, and writers use links to connect them. On the one hand, this eases the stress of writing, allowing the author to work on discrete units, rather than a single long text.

On the other hand, George Landow, a pioneering hypertext writer and theorist, argues that hypertext writers need to pay particular attention to 'arrivals' and 'departures' - the first sentences your reader encounters in arriving at a text block and the last sentences she encounters as she leaves. Each text block, of whatever length, needs to be shaped like a mini-essay, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

New hypertext writers often think the medium eliminates the need for introductions and conclusions. In fact, it multiplies them. For example, if you have five text blocks (or sets of text blocks) in your hypertext, you have to negotiate five beginnings and five endings.