Or Someone Who Felt The Need To Capitalize Every Word Of A Sentence Like An Improperly Formatted Title?
I'vE eVeN mEt PeOpLe WhO tAkE tHe TiMe To TyPe LiKe ThIs....
maybe you've run into someone who thinks that punctuation and capitalization are absolutely unnecessary who talks in long sentenceless rambling hardtofollow garble
As millennials, we've been taught from day one that we are supposed to think out of the box. We're supposed to be different from the next guy. We're supposed to
The point I'm trying to get at is, there is a time and a place for experimenting with "different."
Human beings are linear creatures, so there is a reason we don't type diagonally or sdrawkcab. It simply becomes more distracting than effective.
That being said, I can't argue with the fact that a certain amount of flair works to enhance meaning. Knowing where to push against the confines within which we've functioned thus far in our academic careers gives us an opportunity to mix the textual and the visual in a way that allows us to communicate with each other in a way that our parents could not.
On another note from our reading, every time we start talking about mixed modes and visual texts, I start to think about memes and the huge amount of information we can transmit to each other. The images have become familiar, iconic, if you will, to a point where the background picture sometimes conveys more information than the text.
Can we start referring to "meme" as a genre? I think so...
I completely agree that there is pressure to be unique and NOT just as far as writing is concerned! I'm interested in, though, why it's annoying to write in all caps, write in alternating caps, and write in rainbow colors. Why is this bad? For example, the caps are easy enough to read. They are disorienting at first because we are not used to experiencing text in all caps unless the text is large or the lines are thick, making it easier to read. That brings me to my next point, maybe it's annoying because it makes reading the text more of a challenge or plain old difficult to see. What if we were all used to seeing that kind of text? Would that change how we perceive it? Mainly, would it cease to be considered annoying? I'm not sure. I agree with you...those things are obnoxious to see, especially when you're just trying to read! I couldn't imagine reading a long book in any of those formats. This is an interesting post. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteCrikett—
ReplyDeleteNow I see why it took you an extra twenty minutes to add color to your blog post. Rainbow text — Impressive!
I'm not sure that I entirely agree with your claim that we use text the way we do because we're "linear creatures". I think the word I might use instead is 'inertia-susceptible'. Let me explain.
You say that writing diagonally or backwards is more distracting than effective, but have you ever tried reading a Japanese manga in which the image orientation is still places right to left? It's *really* distracting... until you get used to it. I think that we write the way we do because it's the way we're used to writing, and while it's true that those habits tend to be grounded in some sort of efficiency of reasoning, (like books replacing scrolls perhaps) I think a lot of the grammar and conventions surrounding language are there because they've built on themselves through the traditions of generations. Each language is a gated community, in a sense, and the reason we face kickback for pushing against those gates is because if anything were allowed to through, the soup in that melting pot would get sour fast.
I don't think that this is the main point of your post, and I think that in the more general terms your using in these paragraphs your ideas do hold up. Definitely stuff worth thinking about. Thanks for the read.