I thought this week I’d take a step back from the nitty-gritty of commas and so on, and explain why I’m calling this column on writing for the web – ‘Weave Well’.
I’ve actually ‘borrowed’ this motto from another ‘web’ – not the world wide one, but an eminent 19th-century architect called Sir Aston Webb. He designed among other things part of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the facade of Buckingham Palace, and was responsible for the major restoration during the 1890s of the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great (where I’m the part-time Director of Development – check it out at http://www.greatstbarts.com).
By talking about ‘weaving well’, Sir Aston and his family were of course playing on their surname by referring to the kind of perfect web made by a spider – and a spider’s web was indeed their pictorial device.
The idea of ‘weaving well’ fits just as accurately with attempting good writing for the world wide web as it did with trying to make the perfect building. In a piece of writing for the web – as indeed for any piece of writing, but particularly for short, succinct pieces – no word must be out of place, but each must fit with the rest and go to make up the whole, just as each brick or stone in a well-built building needs to be in the right place, contributing to the overall effect and stability. No individual word, no individual stone is there to bring attention to itself, but only to contribute to the whole.
The poet T.S. Eliot expressed this ideal perfectly in his poem ‘Little Gidding’: ‘And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, An easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, The formal word precise but not pedantic, The complete consort dancing together)…’
So let us all endeavour to weave well in making our own contribution to the world wide web. We may feel we don’t have much influence on world events, but we make a difference and contribute to civilisation just by doing what we do as well as we possibly can.
Virginia Rounding is a published writer whose website of
Internet Resources for Writers looks at additional ways for
writers to earn money, in the hope of making it possible
for them to keep writing without having to resort either to
full-time employment or to destitution. For a selection of
free resources or to subscribe to her new ezine Poetry
Competition Updates, go to
http://www.virginiarounding.com/links.html
