Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 504.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2024-03-22 15:28:31+00:00
        From: Robert Royar <robert@royar.org>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.501: skills of communication (ubi sunt?)

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, with ASCII as the main display code, the
asterisk at the beginning and end of a block of text (hugging the left side
of a character at the beginning of the phrase and the right side of a
letter at the end of the phrase) meant italics (or other emphasis). At
least that was how BBSes I used to frequent and later netnews used the
symbol. The US public-broadcasting personality, Rick Steves, describes the
"rules" on his site's text-markdown page:
https://www.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/understanding-markdown

On Wed, Mar 20, 2024 at 3:24 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:

>
>               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 501.
>         Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                       Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                        www.dhhumanist.org
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>         Date: 2024-03-20 07:15:42+00:00
>         From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
>         Subject: skills of communication
>
> As I prepared messages for Humanist this morning, a memory from long ago
> and a question came to mind.
>
> The question was this: what has happened to the precious resource of
> human attention to explain the outbreak of asterisk disease? Asterisk
> disease is the apparently uncontrollable desire to use this typographic
> device in multiple clusters to draw attention to words and phrases
> regarded as worth the reader's attention. (The cluttering of messages
> with asterisks has to my eye the opposite effect.) Are we to conclude
> that our readers have forgotten how to read, or that our writers have
> forgotten how to communicate effectively?
>
> The memory that came to me, partly as a result of the foregoing
> pathology, was standing with the printer of my high-school newspaper
> over an edition of it and being taught how to design a page to attract
> and hold the attention of readers. Yes, this was a long time ago. The
> man (in this case) had printer's ink on his hands. I was editor of this
> newspaper. I learned a lot from him, principally how to make sure the
> newspaper communicated effectively.
>
> I would that some such thoughts were more often thought.
>
> Comments?
>
> Yours,
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk


--
               Robert Delius Royar
 Caught in the net since 1985


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