Topics: Writers and Writing, Books, Entertainment News
Because I cover the antediluvian communication technology known as the book, I rarely get mixed up in the ongoing, pundit-driven conversation about the Nature of the Internet. Actually, “conversation” hardly seems the right word for what’s largely a symphony of prognostication, thumb-sucking, posturing and enough grandiose shade-throwing to make the drag-ball competitions of “Paris Is Burning” look as sedate as a council session of the EU.
However, inspired by Nicholas Carr’s new book, “The Shallows,” and the feedback of Salon readers, I’ve lately been experimenting with a departure from standard Web practice. I’m refraining from including hyperlinks to relevant sources in the text of my articles and instead collecting them in a paragraph at the end of each piece. Carr’s book refers to several studies indicating that people who read texts containing embedded hyperlinks comprehend and remember less of what they read than people reading plain text.
As a front-page story in the New York Times confirmed on Monday, many regular Internet users are complaining of a growing inability to concentrate, and they, too, blame the siren song of technological distraction. If putting links at the end of my articles instead of installing them in the text makes reading a little bit easier or more pleasant for my own readers (and the majority of them say it does), then it seems worth a shot.
As a result of this little experiment, my name has cropped up, tangentially, in a heated debate about the relative merits of in-text links vs. end links. It’s been fascinating to watch this dust-up unfolding for a variety of reasons. For one, while I don’t agree with everything Carr says in “The Shallows,” if his critics in this quarrel are indicative of the analytical skills fostered by heavy Internet usage, they may be the best support for his arguments yet.
The in-text vs. end links controversy has also prompted thoughtful discussion inside Salon about the nature of good writing. Sarah Hepola conveyed her reservations about jokey links that don’t really add anything to a story; they strike her as “lazy,” an inconvenience to readers who are prodded to check out how clever the writer is. King Kaufman pointed out that Readability — a browser plug-in that reformats text to make it easier on the eyes — just added an optional feature that strips out in-text hyperlinks and collects all the urls at the bottom.
I said I wasn’t sure that Readability, for all its good intentions, really does the trick; the switch from in-text links to end links doesn’t automate as well as you might think. A sentence that’s written to include hyperlinks won’t necessarily make as much sense without them. You write differently when you know you can’t dodge explaining yourself by fobbing the task off on someone more eloquent or better informed. You have to express what you want to say more completely, and you have to think harder about what information ought to be included and what’s merely peripheral. (Knowing what to leave out is as important to writing well as what you include.) Furthermore, I’ve found that if I want to make my paragraph of end links meaningful, I need to include some additional text to explain what the source pages are and why the reader might find them valuable.
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