[stylist] stylist Digest, Vol 81, Issue 10

[Kerry Thompson]

Hi friends,

Bridgit,I use flavored lip gloss and have done so for, oh, never mind 
for how long, since high school. So I had no problem identifying the 
source of the cherry and vanilla. But unless you're writing for an 
exclusively female audience, and a female audience under about fifty at 
that, it would be well to say "...the cherry and vanilla of her lip 
gloss." In general it is never wise to assume that your reader knows 
what you know, has the same associations you have, etc. Explanation is 
always in order.

As to white space: yes, white space is one way of denoting change of POV 
or other change. But, honestly. You wrote this piece for a group of 
blind writers. That is, there is a very good chance your readers can't 
see the white space. If they use screen readers, they certainly won't 
hear it, and it seems likely to me that a braille display might not 
render the full amount of blank space you typed. For that matter, my 
visual display didn't show any more space between sections than between 
paragraphs, because you typed, or my display rendered, an absurd amount 
of space between your paragraphs.

My point is, it is unwise to rely on visual queues like white space a) 
when sending e-mail sinceyou have no way of knowing how your message is 
going to be rendered and b) when sending material to blind readers. In 
fact, whatever your target audience, it is preferable to use asterisks 
rather than white space to separate sections. Better still, write a 
transition between sections.

Everyone, when replying to a message, especially to a digest, please, 
PLEASE delete everything below the immediate message you are responding 
to. I get the digest. So, recently, when therehas been so much activity, 
I get enormously long digests with incredibly long chains of messages. 
The past couple of digestshave been so unwieldy, in fact, that I haven't 
been able to find the beginning of the second actual message for the 
chains of, essentially, garbage. Sometimes, too, the digests become so 
massively long that they crash my mail reader.

It's very simple. Type your reply, scroll down to the end of the message 
to which you are replying, and delete everything below that point. This 
reader will be very grateful.

Solidarity and Peace,

Kerry