Hypertext Writing

"Handwriting doesn't look like real writing, because real writing is published. The letters are neat" (Laurel 138).

Nowhere have I found that my work is shaped by the tools I use more than by working on writing in various mediums. My handwritten writing is much more careful and eloquent than any kind of electronic writing. To make matters even more complicated, there are great variations in my writing according to the application I use. If I write with a word processor, the words flow across the screen in an easy, fluid, albeit unadorned way. In StorySpace, I take so much advantage of the small lexia space that it is a struggle to make any one text chunk contain more than one coherent sentence.

So my hypertext writing is wonderfully disjointed, lacking in transitions, and potentially impossible to follow. I don't mean that it is impossible to navigate through the web; I make sure to facilitate that with the requisite number of links. The problem is that the brevity of my writing make its clarity suffer. Is this good writing? I maintain that sadly, it isn't.