Handwriting in hypertext.
I won't claim that I've honed the process down to an art form, but I readily admit that I've become a rather adept hypertexter. A large part of that ability is conceptual - thinking sentences out in my head gives them form. And the form that naturally springs to my mind is hypertextual - associative thinking in which news ideas grow from snippets of thoughts that are planted in the text.

But I've learned to do this in front of a computer screen, with a word processor, or even better, a simple graphic web document generator. With these my writing takes on a hypertextual form. Without a computer available I find that though I have little difficulty writing by hand, the technology most definitely influences the content (or structure) of that writing. As difficult as it may be to conceptualize the whole of a hypertextual document (and I've written about that before), a number of years of practice seem to have made it easier for me to conceptualize a hyperdocument than to get a feel for the entirety of a handwritten once, especially when my handwriting is trying to imitate the possibilities of an electronic document.


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