The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

Sunday May 6th 1243

Citizens!

Wash your hands of menstrual blood!

Standclearofunclean

menopausalwitches

In this text the link ‘citizens’ produces an aphoristic, linguistically playful
text which inverts the discourse of disability:

a citybuilt only for the disabled

are we crippled

by

abelism?

However, if we choose instead the link ‘unclean’ it produces a reminder of
some of the racial prejudices which have historically surrounded the body:

Angleson Jews in the Middle Ages?

Christians thought the mind their

dominion

the body a filthy Jewish domain

This is a fraction of the hypertexts in Wordstuffs: The City and The Body,
and demonstrates only a few of the possible alternatives even for navigat-
ing through this small section.

Hypertext as hyperactive

As this example shows, hypertext is a dynamic medium and also an ideal
medium for mixing different genres of writing. In hypertext prose, fiction,
poetry, criticism, non-fiction and theory can all intermingle.
Hypertext markedly increases the interactivity of the reader. Interactiv-
ity is very important because audiences become bored if they are passive.
Give people something to do, and they immediately wake up and feel more
involved and in control. In hypertext, readers have to trigger links, and
their choices shape the contours of the particular readings they retrieve.
In hypertext it is also possible to produce texts in colour: this is nor-
mally not possible with on-the-page writing (even visual poetry has
tended to be in black and white). Colours can be used in a multiplicitous

242 The Writing Experiment