Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 358.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2026-03-06 06:57:11+00:00
        From: Emmanuela Carbé <emmanuela.carbe@unive.it>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.356: catching and keeping the attention of a reader

Dear Professor,

thank you for raising a question about the conditions of writing in email
environments. Rhetorical clarity certainly remains the most effective way
of sustaining a reader’s attention: no typographic signal can compensate
for a message that lacks structure or substance.

At the same time, I wonder whether visual cues and rhetoric are always so
easily separable. The history of written culture suggests otherwise:
rubrication, enlarged initials, paragraph signs, and systems of
abbreviation have long functioned as devices to orient the reader’s eye and
signal textual structure. In this sense, small graphic markers have often
been part of the economy of attention on the page rather than mere ornament.

In the history of typography one might recall, for instance, the appearance
of italic type in the editions of Aldo Manuzio. In 1500, in his edition of
the Epistole (!!) of S. Caterina da Siena, the phrase “iesu dolce iesu
amore” appears in italic within the woodcut representing the saint holding
a book, almost a first experimental appearance of the new type, which would
then be used systematically in Aldine editions from the following year.

More generally, epistolary writing, even in the twentieth century, shows
various techniques (sometimes typographic) used to attract the reader’s
attention or economize reading time: underlining, isolated words, or other
small graphic signals. It is interesting to understand how such practices
enter the system of digital epistolography in mailing lists (one-to-many),
perhaps also looking at the archaeology of these environments, for instance
the texts produced in early BBS systems. But perhaps we should not look
only at the epistolary ancestors of email: other historical forms of
one-to-many communication might also be relevant (i.e. edicts, public
notices, posted broadsides) where the visual disposition of text already
played an explicit role in capturing the attention of a wider audience.

And: might there sometimes be a more prosaic explanation for the asterisks
we encounter? Could they simply be residues of formatting conventions from
richer writing environments, which become visible once a message passes
through the austere conditions of plain text? In that case it is
interesting to observe how readily the eye translates the asterisk into a
signal of emphasis, almost automatically reading it as italic or bold.

Best regards,
ec

Emmanuela Carbé
Professoressa associata di Letteratura italiana contemporanea
Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH
<https://www.unive.it/pag/39287>)
Membro del direttivo AIUCD <https://www.aiucd.it/>
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici
Università Ca' Foscari Venezia

Palazzo Malcanton Marcorà
Dorsoduro 3484/D, Calle Contarini
30123 Venezia, Italia



Il giorno ven 6 mar 2026 alle 07:11 Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> ha
scritto:

>
>               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 356.
>         Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                       Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                        www.dhhumanist.org
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>         Date: 2026-03-05 07:56:57+00:00
>         From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
>         Subject: catching and keeping the attention of a reader
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> E-mail in the mode implemented for Humanist is a challenging
> medium. It excludes the otherwise usual typographic means for
> emphasis and so throws us back to questions of layout. It's even
> more primitive than the design principles that the most conservative
> newspaper has to work with. Faced with this problem of how to
> direct the reader's attention, some resort to profligate use of
> asterisks and other non-alphabetic symbols, such as those
> which typographers have called 'dingbats'. For a reason, I'd
> suppose.
>
> It seems to me, especially in the context of a discussion group
> such as Humanist, that by far the most effective means of catching
> and keeping the reader's attention is semantic and rhetorical.
> Having something to say and saying it well.
>
> Against style and meaning is the notion that we're dealing with
> 'information', close to the primitive sense intended by Claude
> Shannon, as if how a text is presented visually makes no difference
> to how it is received. I would suggest this test to anyone before
> posting a message intended to be read: to ask, would I read this
> through? Even more: would someone indifferent to the announced
> subject or activity be persuaded to pay attention? Then ask, if the
> answer is NO, what would be required to fix what is wrong with the
> approach taken? Do the 48 asterisks contribute to getting the
> intended message through? Is the paragraphing effective to that
> end? Where does the eye need a rest? What does not need to be
> said? Ho do I wake my reader up? And so on.
>
> Comments?
>
> All best,
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
>    Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk



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