[The following Notes summarize the main arguments of the first two chapters of Ilana Snyder's imaginative and (sadly) out-of-print book, Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth, New York University Press: New York 1997]

Chapter 1
In this chapter, Snyder assesses the impact of computer-based technologies on writing itself, developing a loose definition of what electronic writing might be, and how the intervention of electronic computer technologies might influence writing as a whole.

Writing and Technology
"Until it was computerized, writing was taken so much for granted that it was no longer recognizable as a technology."

In her short book, Hypertext, Ilana Snyder claims that the intervention of the computer in the writing process has refocused our attention on exactly what writing is and made visible how highly technologized writing has always been, from the reed pen of the Egyptians to the G4 of the global marketplace. (p. 1)

She quotes the classicist and enthusiastic advocate of electronic writing, Richard Lanham, on how current technologies always seem natural, until we have something new to which we can compare them:

We have come to regard print as so inevitable that we have ceased to notice its extraordinary stylization....All non-linear signals are filtered out; colour is banned for serious texts; typographical constants [i.e. font, its size, its spacing, etc.] are rigorously enforced; sound is proscribed; even the tactility of visual elaboration is outlawed. (p. 9)

And according to Stuart Moulthrop, a hypertext pioneer, the new technology always incorporates the old:

'Writing contains speech, print contains writing, film contains both these media, as when a voice-over accompanies a montage of headlines. Hypermedia, the latest of McCluhan's extensions of man [and woman!] unites sound, graphics, print and video. (Stuart Moulthrop, quoted in Snyder, p. 2)

The Writing Space
Snyder notes that:

'The new writing space includes both the computer screen where text is displayed and the electronic memory in which it is stored. This electronic environment is characterized by fluidity, and enables an interactive relationship between reader and writer.

Letters become 'the temporary, transient representations of digital codes stored in a computer's memory,' and and thus, texts on the screen 'are virtual in the sense that they are perceived to be different from what they really are. (p.3)

She argues that writing with a computer blurs the line between thinking and writing via the moving of text from place to place, the spellchecking of a text, the writing of books and essays and yes, even college papers, in disconnected chunks the writer can later arrange (and rearrange and rearrange). (p. 5)

For example, are we writing what we think? Are we writing as we think? Are we writing to think? The malleability of text on a screen, or stored in an electronic memory, allows writers to plunge into a chaos of creativity from which they can pull not just order but many 'orders' at will.

Metaphors
Snyder demonstrates how constrained by the conventions of print are our metaphors for managing digital information on a screen. It as if the vocabulary and images of print imprison the imagination of the computer user:

'Miniature desktops, little file icons, partially overlaid open files, pup-up notebooks, clipboards, rubbish bins for discards: it is as if the user had never left the familiar world of paper.' (p. 6)

These 'print' legacies prevent our understanding the new textuality of the screen or 'the ways of knowing presented by the electronic medium.' (p.6) Even the use of the word text carries with it the whiff of freshly cut paper, the tang of printers' ink and the fixed, white-margined longer-than-it-is-tall page. As Snyder notes in her introduction to this book, we haven't even invented a new word to describe the new text of the computer screen.

Multilayered Grammars
Snyder adapts the idea of multi-layered grammars (from Computers and Composition guru Cynthia Selfe) to explain the complexity of writing online: the page is part of the grammar of the book, the screen, for/in/through which electronic writers are now composing, is part of the grammar of the computer. (p. 7).

The grammar of the two is quite different:

'Pages are static units in a spatial text. Screens, by contrast, do not display units of text because "they are temporal windows on a virtual text"...Screens also have different formal conventions. Unlike pages, they are not numbered, their margins are fluid, and they have cursors, windows and menu lines.'

In other words, the page structures space, while the screen structures time. (p. 8). And the electronic writer has to understand the grammars of the screen, not simply impose the grammars on the page onto the screen.

The Emerging Electronic Writer
Snyder lists the ways in which the intervention of the screen/the adapting of the screen changes the ways in which writers can write (although not all writers necessarily change). She breaks down the impact of the 'easy generation, manipulation and revision of text' thus:

• freedom from retyping whenever a text changes encourages experimentation and risk-taking
  
• the speed of writing adapts to the speed of thought (you can write everything down and worry about what it means and how you will organize it later) because
• the need to key in text only once frees time for creative writing and revision
• screens and keys allow writers to shape and develop thoughts, ideas and concepts more flexibly
  
• the attention paid to the relationship between detail and structure changes (i.e. do you really need that outline when you can store different sections of your composition electronic and reorganize them (ad nauseum) with a few keystrokes
  
• the interaction and combination of previously unconnected ideas is much easier (pp. 9 - 10)
• the writer is no longer limited by the length of the line or the page
• text can be infinitely reshaped for different audiences and purposes (p. 11)

In essence, electronic writing allows writers to carry out the processes of planning, writing and revising as and when they wish, a process much more natural to many people than the the three-stage linear process inculcated in school and college: i) plan your paper; ii) write your paper; iii) revise your paper.

They can plan a section A (store the plan), write two paragraphs of section A (store those), write a thousand unplanned words because an idea suddenly struck them, even if they don't know exactly where those words will fit (store those words), revise the the two paragraphs of section A (store those), and so on. The guiding principle of computer-mediated writing is free-flowing association, not a rigid sequence of cause and effect. (pp. 10 - 11

The Visual Text
Electronic writing allows writers to control easily and directly (if sometimes inexpertly) 'every aspect of presentation:'

• font
  
• pitch and point size
  
• color of the font
• color of the screen or background
  
• margins
  
• tabs
  
• columns
• borders
• headings
• titles

They can see how such decisions alter the visual message of the text at any stage in the process, whether they plan to present the text electronically or in print [think Print Preview in Microsoft Word]: Writers can use graphic elements of text to shape a visual message to convey complex ideas long before a reader reads a word. (p. 11)

Chapter 2