Belinda Kroll blogs as “Worderella” and packaged a collection of her blog advice to writers as a mini-book called Worderella on Writing.
I could not find even one hyphen at the end of any line in the book.
The effect is not artistic; it’s just plain silly, often ugly and unnecessarily difficult to read.
The pages are set flush-left/ragged-right, but the right sides are not just ragged, they're J A GG E D, with huge, unattractive gaps that could easily have been avoided.
Up above, the black vertical bar indicates the theoretical right margin of the pages, and the pinkish-purplish lines show where hyphenated words could have filled in some of the empty spaces.
Belinda was writer, designer and publisher -- so she gets all of the blame for this bad decision.
A book that tries to advise writers should have been done better.
(I admit that I am not perfect.)
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Good post, Michael. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteType doesn't have to be fully justified, but there is no excuse for big gaps on the right.
It's not that hard to hyphenate a word. Word processors can even do it automatically (but not perfectly).