Subject: Re: open spaces
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Fri Jan 26 2001 - 10:18:16 GMT
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 09:26:47AM +0000, Scottie Bowman wrote:
> Do the great style manuals say anything about
> the matter? People talk so much - & quite rightly
> - about 'ear' but I can't say I ever heard much about
> the need for an 'eye'.
I don't recall ever seeing a style manual, aside from the wonderful
Chicago Book of Style (which is designed for book publishers and
other designers of printed material), which DOES have instructive
advice about the visual characteristics of the printed page. I love
my Chicago Book. But I'm eccentric that way.
The problem, perhaps, is that writers have never (arguably until
recently) had much say in how their work would appear. The writer
churned out a manuscript on a typewriter, and the publisher converted
that paperwork into a book or magazine article. In fact, many
professional writers used professional typists to produce the
absolute, complete, finished-and-out-of-here fair copy of a
manuscript.
It's almost trite to say that now, with the advent of both computing
and web publishing, writers can assert more control over how their
work looks. Though not in email. (I'll come back to this in a
moment.) Anyway, however, most writers I know still see their
computers as sophisticated typewriters and continue to turn out
well-formed pages with 1-inch margins and double-spaced lines and
underscores to represent italics, and so on.
> And if you all care so much about it, why does no one -
> EXCEPT ME - make any attempt to shape their e-mails?
> There's only one other guy I've ever come across (& he
> on the Austen list) who - in sure & certain emulation
> of myself - indents his stuff with the courtesy & fastidiousness
> of a proper writer. You open his stuff & are at once
> drawn into it with a lightened & expectant heart.
The problem with email is that it is not designed such that what you
turn out will look precisely that way when the recipient gets it.
For instance, your (Scottie's) care in putting in a left margin
frequently wreaks havoc with my mailer, which is a pure text box
that is 80 x 24 characters in size and that wraps at column 72
or thereabouts. But I deal with it when it wraps oddly in my replies.
In this case, I got lucky: no eccentric lines I had to reformat. Such
are the vagaries of mail.
(Why do I have the nagging suspicion that there's a meaty essay
lurking under the surface of this exchange? Something addressing
Scottie's concerns about appearances in electronic exchanges, I mean.)
What is worse are the people who generate mail as HTML. It may work
for web-based mailers (and other mailers that can read fancy
formatting), but for someone like me, it comes out as a blank screen,
and if I want to read it, I have to forward it to another computer
that has a graphical mail reader. Most of the time I delete it
unread, unless circumstances dictate that I deal with it, or I ask the
sender to resend it as plain text.
To use your words, I "shape [my] e-mail" according to a style that has
been in use for a couple of decades. It's not an accident that my
text, in email, is flush left, with no formatting, is single-spaced,
and with each new paragraph is a discrete block. My approach to email
style is descended from ye olde days of the Internet, when text was
nothing more than text and the fanciest you got was to inject a
"smiley" under appropriate circumstances, and hope that a crusty
recipient didn't scream at you in response. 8-)
> As opposed to the sinking spirits induced by the average
> presentation: no margins, no capitalisations, no paragraphs,
> just one endless anaconda of undifferentiated words.
I agree with you (though I'm unlikely ever to indent my paragraphs)
that it's a treat to read text that has been thoughtfully set upon the
screen, and I personally DO appreciate the care with which you and
other people (let's admit it, there are others here) craft their mail.
At least we're not as obsessive-compulsive as Michael Hart, the head
of Project Gutenberg, who types his plain-text messages such that
every single paragraph is perfectly right-justified, and he does this
by precisely phrasing every line so that it comes out the right
length, only rarely cheating by using an extra space.
The only other tic I guess *I* exhibit is from the days when user
names never had uppercase letters, and I got in the habit of signing
myself at the bottom with two hyphens and my literal login name, as
in:
--tim
P.S. Out of respect for Scottie's carefully crafted text (I'm not
being facetious here, you ironists!), however, I always find myself
compelled to uppercase the "T" in "Tim" when I write to him privately.
Go figure....
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