
How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing - rglovejoy
http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/changed-by-web-and-weblog
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michael_dorfman
Unfortunately for his argument, Greenspun seems to be unfamiliar with the
history of the magazine. He writes:

 _"Suppose that an idea merited 20 pages, no more and no less? A handful of
long-copy magazines, such as the old New Yorker would print 20-page essays,
but an author who wished his or her work to be distributed would generally be
forced to cut it down to a meaningless 5-page magazine piece or add 180 pages
of filler until it reached the minimum size to fit into the book distribution
system."_

This is simply untrue-- there have been, over the past 500 years, many
magazines and journals publishing 20-page pieces. The shortening of the
average magazine piece is an artifact of the past 75 years. To view the
history of publishing as one monolithic period from Gutenberg to the Web is
absurd.

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gcv
Also, what about books of essays? I'm not entirely sure it would address
Greenspun's point about where to publish an article on how to put together a
workable DSLR setup, but essayists have published many 20-page pieces just by
putting together enough of them to make up a book.

~~~
wmf
You must have missed this part:

"How about a collection? If an author writes enough essays, eventually they
can be collected into a 200-page book and distributed commercially. Many
authors are experts on only a single subject and should not be encouraged to
continue scribbling."

~~~
carpo
All the essays in such a book don't have to be from the same author.

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sireat
For some reason, whenever I read Greenspun's writing, I get the feeling it is
written partially tongue-in-cheek.

This particular article is mostly on the mark, but in the world where
everyone's thoughts are heard, filtering becomes extremely important.

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russell
Where are those 20 page essays on the web? The typical blogging format seems
to be 2 paragraphs and a link to someone else's 4 paragraphs. Or maybe there
arent enough people with anything thoughtful to say.

~~~
hko
<http://paulgraham.com/articles.html>

~~~
zimbabwe
Paul writes short articles. His most recent was barely three pages long. He
writes _good_ articles, but let's stop citing him for everything in the hopes
that we'll get YCombinator circlejerk karma.

I'm checking my own blog sources. Very few people ever reach five pages, let
alone twenty. Steve Yegge's penultimate post was 17 pages.

~~~
ewiethoff
What do you mean by "penultimate"?

~~~
Hexstream
Second-to-longest, I think... or second-to-last...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penultimate>

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Alex3917
This article was disappointing. I thought he was going to identify the salient
features of writing designed for the web. Hopefully he will in his talk.

~~~
zimbabwe
"Writing designed for the web"? You're firmly in Bullshit Central if that's
your mindset.

No good writing is ever designed past a point. Novelists, essayists,
journalists, all have a distinct style. Most of them break all the rules there
are. Online, there's an even huger difference, even in similar fields. Jason
Kottke versus Andy Baio. FiveThirtyEight versus Andrew Sullivan. Nobody sounds
the same. That's the point.

Do you want Copyblogger? "Make bullet points, bold words to emphasize, write
short paragraphs, include five links in every sentence, include a picture of a
naked woman with lolspeak written above?" Because all you'll learn is that
there's no such thing as a "salient feature" of writing. There's writing, and
different people do different things, and some people like certain kinds of
writing more than other. Some people write paragraphs with a few hundred
sentences, and people read their stuff because it's good. Other people write
in very sparse shorthand. It's all allowed, and it's often all good.

~~~
Alex3917
I understand that there are a wide variety of acceptable writing styles. That
said, there are many literary devices and techniques that wouldn't have been
possible without the Internet. And, when writing for the Internet, it often
makes sense to incorporate these as they tend to improve one's writing.

~~~
zimbabwe
"Literary devices and techniques?" Do you mean... hyperlinking? Because
there's nothing else that's been done online that wasn't done previously in
other mediums.

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twopoint718
I'll offer Michael Joyce as an example:

<http://faculty.vassar.edu/mijoyce/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afternoon:_a_story>

I think you could consider this a use of hyperlinking before the web. And if
you count "As We May Think", then it is a use _way_ before the web.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think>

~~~
zimbabwe
Very cool stuff! I knew of Joyce, though I've never read Afternoon (I'm
worried it won't meet expectations), but As We May Think I'd never heard of
before.

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twopoint718
After I heard about him, I went to my campus library and checked out
"Afternoon." It comes on one 3.5" floppy disk and couldn't be removed from the
reading room. So I sat down (at the only machine left with a floppy drive) and
clicked through it for about an hour.

It is certainly very different from a usual novel. For starters you have no
idea how long it is. Hyperlinks aren't highlighted as we've come to expect and
so I have to admit that I was doing some Myst-style random clicking at times.
You'll often get back to the same paragraph but through a different path,
these paragraphs are usually written in such a way that they would make sense
by any path that you'd arrived at them.

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10ren
I'm not sure about his thesis, but I like his evidence. e.g.

[http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/12/01/why-pretend-
to...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/12/01/why-pretend-to-care-
about-others-when-we-have-professional-therapis/)

"Being poor is caring about your friends" (paraphrasing)

