Writing for the Web

Canadian-Iranian blogger sentenced to 19 years in prison

Via The Globe and Mail: Canadian-Iranian blogger sentenced to 19 years in prison. Excerpt:

An Iranian court sentenced the founder of one of the first Farsi-language blogs, credited with sparking the boom in Iranian reform bloggers, to more than 19 years in prison for his writings, a website reported Tuesday. 

Iranian-Canadian Hossein Derakhshan, 35, was a controversial figure among Iran's blogging community. Writing his blog from Canada, he was initially a critic of Iran's clerical leadership, and in 2006 he visited Israel — Iran's archenemy — saying he wanted to act as a bridge between the two countries' peoples. 

But he later became a vocal supporter of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, praising him for standing up to the West and criticizing regime opponents. 

Mr. Derakhshan then visited Iran in 2008 and was arrested. Over the next two years, he was often held without communication with family or lawyers, according to rights groups. 

Mashreghnews.ir, which is close to Iran's presidential office, reported Tuesday that Mr. Derakhshan was convicted on charges of co-operation with hostile countries — a reference to the Israel visit — spreading propaganda against the ruling establishment, promotion of counterrevolutionary groups and insulting Islamic thought and religious figures. 

The court sentenced him to 19 1/2 years in prison, the report said, adding that Mr. Derakhshan can appeal. It was unclear if he would benefit from time served. 

Mr. Derakhshan helped ignite blogging in Iran by posting simple instructions online on how to create sites in Farsi in 2001. 

The flourishing of blogs by Iranians at home and abroad that resulted gave the country's reform movement an online platform that has helped it survive heavy crackdowns at home — though authorities tried to block many, including Mr. Derakhshan's.

The Globe also has an editorial about this sorry affair.

Celebrating white space

Via Poynter Online, Roy Peter Clark says: On National Punctuation Day, let's celebrate white space. Excerpt:

During the newspaper design revolution of the 1980s and 90s, writers often made fun of white space. Bad idea, scribes. 

Inside the text, white space is a writer's and a reader's best friend. White space helps emphasize what is most important on the page or screen, provides a kind of visual index that clues in the reader to the main parts of the story, and ventilates tedious grayness, relaxing the eyes and reassuring the mind. 

White space, I would argue, should be considered a form of punctuation, partly because other traditional marks of punctuation work have been designed to create it. 

Let's take, for example, borscht belt comedian Henny Youngman's most famous joke, which I found punctuated four different ways online: 

1. Take my wife, please. 

2. Take my wife ... please. 

3. Take my wife. Please. 

4. Take my wife -- please. 

If the secret of humor is timing, then the secret of timing on the page is punctuation. In this case, my preference is #4. The comma offers the least separation between the premise and the punch line. The ellipsis is too airy. The period separates elements of a complete thought, turning what should be one sentence into two. But the dash manages to both connect and separate the elements. Notice that part of that separation is the creation of white space between "wife" and "please." 

One of the great purveyors of white space is the bulleted list, a textual element that gained prominence during the design revolution and has found a comfortable new home on the Internet. 

A bullet comes to English from French and means "little ball," a reference not just to a gun projectile but also -- in printing -- to "a heavy dot used to highlight a passage." A list of such highlighted passages is called a bulleted list. 

Such a strategy offers writers and readers these benefits: 

•The ability to check information at a glance.

•Information conveyed in tight spaces. 

•Order, at least the appearance of order. 

•Relief to the eye and the mind in the form of white space.

For more about National Punctuation Day, see my post on Ask the English Teacher.

Is page reading different from screen reading?

Thanks to Maryn McKenna for tweeting David Dobbs's Wired article: Is page reading different from screen reading? Excerpt (but read the whole article):

I revise effectively both onscreen and on paper, but I revise differently on paper. I work more at a macro scale. I’m more sensitive to proportion and rhythm and timbre. I see spaces and densities better: the clumps where the prose has grown too dense, the wandering of the path where I ramble, the seams that need to be closed, the misaligned joint that I suddenly realize — yeah; there it is! — is where that paragraph from three pages ahead belongs. 

As Jonah asks, Why? Is the manuscript’s physicality giving me a greater sense of physical proportion? Does the act of pressing slickened grooves into the page with my fountain pen somehow invite a corresponding mental penetration? Is the curved, flexible rigidity of five sheets in my hand sharpening my awareness of texture? Or perhaps the slowness of my pen relative to the speed of my typing favors this more structural approach — big cross outs, sections circled and moved wholesale, massive reorganizations planned with quick scribbles in the margin — over the finer-grained tweaks and cutting-and-pasting the keyboard seems to encourage. 

I don’t know. But I know it’s different. It’s like putting down your violin and climbing out of the string section to take the conductor’s podium. And it works reliably. I know that when my fifth or ninth or fifteenth onscreen edit isn’t getting me anywhere or is digging me deeper into some hole I can’t get the dimensions of, I can print the manuscript and get above ground and suddenly see things I was missing.

I have a similar need to edit a hard copy, and I feel a little anxious when time pressure pushes me to email a story I've edited only on the screen.