The shackles are my own.

The truth is, of course, that more than anything else I write about myself - about how I relate to the topics that I choose to examine. The least successful of these columns (to my mind) are those in which I remain detached from the topic I'm discussing. Not that there's anything wrong with a detached, objective examination of an interesting topic. It's just that others do it much better than I do. I've read articles by columnists who are much more adept at dissecting a subject, examining it from various aspects, and even producing enlightening insights about that subject than I am. Though I sometimes (perhaps often) remark to myself that I wish that I had written a particular sentence (or paragraph, or entire column) that I read, I've learned that, for better and often for worse, my writing is different.

The classic paragraph style suits the writing of columnists of the sort I've noted here much better than it does mine (though of course they often stray from it as well). When you're trying to make a point, and you know what that point is, classic expository essay writing is right on target. (It should, perhaps, go without saying - though of course in these pages it hardly ever does - that there's an unavoidable, perhaps inevitable, correspondence between form and function involved here.) Although that classic writing style is admittedly well ingrained in me, and even suits me well in some of my other writing projects, here, the very nature of what I'm writing about demands that I try to transcend it.

Essays don't have to rely on hypertext to create a flow of thoughts and associations. The best are able to do this with a minimum of fancy tools. A recent essay by Paul Graham is a case in point. Graham, someone whom I wasn't familiar with until I stumbled upon a link to one of his articles, writes about the true nature of essay writing as opposed to writing for a grade in school. He notes that:
An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
Graham does a wonderful job of checking out what's inside the question of writing an essay, and he does it without needing links. In a way I'm jealous. He makes it look easy. Though the hypertextual feel of the Boidem suggests disorganization, a collection of thoughts that lean more toward the random than toward the planned, I often feel as though I need my links as crutches to organize my thinking, that without them my writing would be much less decipherable.


Go to: The (ir)relevance of hypertext