The Shape of Text to Come: The Texture of Print on Screens

Abstract

art of the rhetoric and text structure of paper documents, and this praxis exerts a strong shaping influence over texts produced via electronic media. We are in a state of rapid evolution, with heavy borrowing on the history of text on paper, applied sometimes appropriately and sometimes inappropriately to the new medium. Because electronic text does not create a totally new rhetoric but depends for its design on the strategies of paper texts, the starting point in this analysis is not How do screen-based texts differ categorically or essentially from their paper-based counterparts? but What is a framework for understanding dimensions of variation in texts across the two media? This paper uses a text analytical approach to identify nine dimensions of variation that help map the differences between paper and on-screen text. Screen-based text tends to exploit these dimensions to a greater degree than does paper text. To a relatively greater extent, then, on-screen text tends to be: Situationally Embedded: The text doesn't stand alone but is bound up within the context of situation-the ongoing activities and events that make the text part of the action.

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