Writing for the Web

Obama: The first hypertext inaugural speech?

I'm not a huge fan of Stanley Fish, but today in the New York Times he did the best parsing I've seen of Barack Obama’s Prose Style. Excerpt:

... if you look at the text – spread out like a patient etherized on a table – that’s exactly what it’s like. There are few transitions and those there are – “for,” “nor,” “as for,” “so,” “and so” – seem just stuck in, providing a pause, not a marker of logical progression. 

Obama doesn’t deposit us at a location he has in mind from the beginning; he carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate. 

Of course, as something heard rather than viewed, the speech provides no spaces for contemplation. We have barely taken in a small rhetorical flourish like “All this we can do. All this we will do” before it disappears in the rear-view mirror. 

But if we regard the text as an object rather than as a performance in time, it becomes possible (and rewarding) to do what the pundits are doing: linger over each alliteration, parse each emphasis, tease out each implication. 

There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.” 

The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward. One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word.

Parataxis is what hypertext is all about: individual ideas, with no connections between them except those that the reader chooses to make. For much of my forty years as a teacher of writing, I pushed my students to make connections. 

Lead your reader from one idea to the next, I told them. That "Next" or "Therefore" or "However" would put your reader into the right frame of mind.

But for close to two decades, we have increasingly read hypertext rather than print text, and made our own connections between chunks. Obama's own prose style is quite at home in print, where he's talking to us one on one. When he's talking to a million people face to face, and a couple of billion around the world, he settles comfortably into parataxis. 

No one seems to mind.

Welcome to the White House—and the 21st Century (updated)

Back in 2002, giving a workshop in Sao Paulo, I showed my students the current White House website. It was pretty dull, but it did offer a page in Spanish. Politically smart, I guess, except that the links on the Spanish page were still in English. Politics on the web was still pretty primitive.

Last year I wrote an article about the gorgeous Barack Obama campaign website. Clearly, the upstart understood the web far better than any other politician on the planet. 

Now, on the day of his inauguration, we have an invitation: Welcome to the White House.

Webwriters, take notes. Barack Obama has raised the standard. 

I've discussed the site in more detail on The Hook, the politics blog of The Tyee.

Update: Jimmy Orr at the Christian Science Monitor has a good article on the site, written from his perspective as W's original website guy.

Obama's wisdom about email

Via CNN Political Ticker: Obama thinks he can keep his blackberry. Excerpt:

President-elect Barack Obama told CNN Friday he thinks he may be able to “hang onto” his BlackBerry after all. 

In an interview with CNN’s John King, he talked about the privacy issues that threaten his ability to maintain normal communications – and his optimism that, unlike his predecessor, he’s going to be able to keep using e-mail after he enters the Oval Office. 

Then there’s the BlackBerry. “You like these,” said CNN’s John King. “I was just with you before this, and you had a couple of them. And there are a lot of people who say, because this will end up in the presidential library, because you don't have privacy any more. Your life's about to change Tuesday noon. You have to give this up.” 

“Yes,” conceded Obama. 

“You going to do it?” asked King. 

“I think we're going to be able to beat this back,” Obama responded. “….I think we're going to be able to hang onto one of these. Now, my working assumption, and this is not new, is that everything I write on e-mail could end up being on CNN. So I make sure that — to think before I press ‘send.’”

If only the rest of us would think before we press "send."

The 2008 Weblog Awards

The polls are now open for The 2008 Weblog Awards: Polls Archives. Even if you're not a fan of such competitions, you may find some worthwhile blogs in unexpected places.

The Layoffs Will Be Blogged

Via The New York Times, a article by Claire Cain Miller: The Layoffs Will Be Blogged. Excerpt:

Elon Musk, chief executive of the electric-car company Tesla Motors in San Carlos, Calif., said that he had no choice other than to blog about the Oct. 15 layoffs at the closely watched company - even though some employees had not yet been told they were losing their jobs. 

Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip blog owned by Gawker Media, had already published the news, and it was being picked up by traditional media reporters, Mr. Musk said. 

“We had to say something to prevent articles being written that were not accurate.” 

Blogging about staff cuts is particularly prevalent in Silicon Valley, where tech gossip sites pounce on every rumor and Web-savvy employees broadcast their every thought on personal blogs and Twitter feeds. 

Start-up companies in particular seem to the feel pressure to break bad news on their own blogs so that they can better control the message. 

Unlike more traditional firms, many of today’s Web companies were built on the mission of creating transparency for users. Executives have lived that mission, blogging about company successes. Now that bad times are coming, some of them feel the need to make that public, too. A blog post also comes across as more heartfelt than a press release with canned quotations.

Writing the Web’s Future in Many Languages

Via the December 30 New York Times: Writing the Web’s Future in Many Languages. Excerpt:

The next chapter of the World Wide Web will not be written in English alone. Asia already has twice as many Internet users as North America, and by 2012 it will have three times as many. 

Already, more than half of the search queries on Google come from outside the United States.

The globalization of the Web has inspired entrepreneurs like Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, an engineer from outside Bangalore, India. Mr. Ram Prakash learned English as a teenager, but he still prefers to express himself to friends and family members in his native Kannada. But using Kannada on the Web involves computer keyboard maps that even Mr. Ram Prakash finds challenging to learn. 

So in 2006 he developed Quillpad, an online service for typing in 10 South Asian languages. Users spell out words of local languages phonetically in Roman letters, and Quillpad’s predictive engine converts them into local-language script. Bloggers and authors rave about the service, which has attracted interest from the cellphone maker Nokia and the attention of Google Inc., which has since introduced its own transliteration tool. 

Mr. Ram Prakash said Western technology companies have misunderstood the linguistic landscape of India, where English is spoken proficiently by only about a tenth of the population and even many college-educated Indians prefer the contours of their native tongues for everyday speech. 

“You’ve got to give them an opportunity to express themselves correctly, rather than make a fool out of themselves and forcing them to use English,” he said.

It's a fascinating article about an important development. I've added a link to Quillpad in the Webwriting Resources list.