I am trying to break myself of a bad habit I have had for well over a decade now.
Not putting a ● at the end of a paragraph.
Blame Sir Alan Sugar (sorry, Baron Sugar). My first ‘home computer’ was an Amstrad Notebook which, on price & size, suited my needs perfectly – I had ample access to more complicated machines for jobs other than just writing, & other ‘home computers’ were just oversized, expensive, clunky dust traps.
But I ran into a very annoying problem. When I printed out my efforts (on a dot matrix machine – I never took to inkjet) I would find a symbol something like έ at the end of paragraphs – on the page but invisible on the screen.
The only way I could find to remove it (other than Snopake) was to remove the ●.
Then I realised that – aesthetically – this was rather pleasing. The ● is superfluous, redundant, at the end of a paragraph which will usually finish before the end of a line & will be followed by a pleasing white double space.
So, Out, damn’d dot!
But then, only recently, I saw one of my blog posts on some kind of rss feed or readerOh dear! The spaces had been suppressed or compressed, so paragraphs run togetherIn a most disconcerting wayJust like this.
Not helped by the way my writing style has changed because shorter, punchier points are, I fondly believe, easier to read on a screen than are densely argued paragraphs.
So, I am trying to remember to put the ● back in.
Another small lesson about how technology changes how we do things in ways that we do not, cannot always, anticipate when we sweat over the feasibility studies, specifications & instructions to systems analysts & programmers.
Technology changes the style, not just the possibility, of communication
