Martin Rice on fri 6 sep 02
=?iso-8859-1?Q?mer?=
A special plea. I've not participated in this dialogue on list -- though I
did drop a line to someone off list. The reason I didn't is because I'm a
language freak/geek and have devoted my entire life to the study and
teaching of language and I would have probably gone off on a tirade that no
one needed to read.
And no, I haven't changed my mind with this post, I'm not going to write
about clear language and grammar -- no, Janet, it's not spelled grammer in
the US, though it's hard to tell :-)
If something is badly written here on Clayart and I have a real interest in
the subject, I push through and read it -- I have so much to learn. If I'm
not interested, I delete it.
But the special plea I mentioned is that people break up their letters to
the list, especially long ones, into paragraphs. And they don't even have to
be the logical kind of paragraphs that English teachers talk about, so I
guess I just mean put some white space on the page. It makes it soooooo much
easier to read that a single huge block of text.
There have been a myriad of studies about this done by PR people,
advertisers, page designers both for print publications and expecially the
Internet, educators, publishers, etc., etc. And the bottom line is, people
will be more likely to read what you've written almost in direct ratio to
how much white space is on the page.
Thanks for reading this.
Martin
Lagunas de Barú, Costa Rica
http://www.rice-family.org
| |
|
