How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing | Hacker News Reader

How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing

philip.greenspun.com

32 pointsrglovejoy20 comments

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

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.

What do you mean by "penultimate"?

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

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

they're out there. it's just that short posts on inflammatory topics are more visible. believe me there are people out there churning out novels worth of material.

Here's how writing (and other things) are supposed to work now that we have easy publishing on the web:

1. Publish your ideas early and often. 2. Have others debug your work. 3. Track the ongoing conversation around the idea. 4. Iterate.

That's how things should work, blogging in particular, but in practice people think differently about the medium. Many blogs are really bad, without commenters. But some people use blogging for what I'd consider essay writing.

Essays to me are about one person doing the thinking upfront and then publishing after they vetted it; the mistakes they make stay in their heads. In theory, an essay is could finish the issue at hand, but more often it doesn't. I think the best essays do close the issue they address.

I like essays -- I intend to write them myself -- but for a while I thought that they've become outmoded. Why let one person vet an idea in private, when it can be done publicly; it's much more efficient, when done right.

But there's still value in one person vetting they're own ideas before publishing. And some people are just better at creating "seeds" ideas to vet.

I like Greenspuns point about how mediums effect how people judge the veracity of an idea; I agree. There's certain ideas I don't bother posting because I don't believe anyone would believe it when expressed through a certain medium. Nobody would believe a new theory of quantum gravitation that first arrived as a forum post.

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.

"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.

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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

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