Writing and Typesetting

This next statement may give away my age, but I will run that risk. My first desk job was right around the dawn of the desktop publishing era, when laser printers became more than a rich man's toy, people in a small office could produce camera-ready copy, and the company newsletter could be produced in-house instead of through some print service. Yes, it was a glorious time learning about fonts, point sizes, text wrapping and photo placement. However, the greatest thing I ever got to learn about was every single way I could embellish a word or sentence to make it really pop off the page.

I would later learn why this was a horrible lesson.

These days we see it everywhere: ALL CAPS to scream at someone, bold letters so something cannot be missed, underline being used to point out that something is important, and the MONSTROUS COMBINATION OF ALL OF THEM if something is just that important. Really? Is this all necessary? Well, apparently, once people had access to them, they went crazy with all the emphasis added to different parts of a sentence, to where you could see the important parts of a page from five feet away. This changed a lot about styles of writing. Unfortunately, most of that change was for the worse.

Back in the day of the typewriter, people could not boldface a word, or italicize, or do a lot of things without an extensive amount of work, and style manuals explained things through very explicit rules meant to keep everything consistent. All caps was usually only used in declarative form, such as referring to a statement on a billboard or some non-narrative function. Then people learned about typesetting and that all went out the window. 

While a few typing effects have gained a degree of acceptance - italics in dialogue to emphasis an inflection - the rest are still shunned. The argument behind this as that the writing should explain if something is screamed out, important, or urgent, and none of this should depend on a visual crutch. Think of the way you talk. Nobody sees your words, so we shift our voice in tone and rhythm to make a difference. When we yell, we have exclamation points. When we are emphatic, our facial cues and body language change, which is portrayed through descriptors. When we pause, enter the comma or ellipsis. So many simple tools with grammar and punctuation are built right into the process, but writers become lazy and rely on the typesetting to convey a point.

Our simple commas, ellipses, and exclamation points are great tools to stylize a character's voice, and when we pivot on a particular word, our writing can express that along with fleshing out the character. In many ways, part of the art of writing is working with the tools you have in grammar and punctuation in order to create things that go beyond words. Leaving behind the crutches exercises your legs more than anything else will, so try and step around the typesetting shortcuts when possible.