An introduction to a Hypertext Alphabet Primer

THE RaVEN CHRONICLES

A Hypertext Alphabet

Matt Briggs

"Before them, on the screen... in an orange computer font--Garamond Antigua--were the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet, as perfect and simple as atoms must have seemed when Democritus (she thought) imagined them, those simple squiggles of which arguments were formed, those squiggles that divided houses and united them, that were arranged into words intoned over baptisms and death... Words were civilization!"
RICK MOODY Purple America, 1997

The alphabetic principal is how spoken language is mapped into written language.

1) Significant amount of variance in understanding of the alphabetical principal can be explained by phonemic awareness and letter name knowledge.

The mnemonic song of the alphabet is probably the only song I sing each day. Each time I use the mailboxes at work, I mutter the first letter of the person's last name and I sing the ABCs to place the name Gilland, abcdefG and I find the name-slot the slot. Otherwise, it could be anywhere.

The alphabet book teaches letter shapes and sounds and help students map the written language to their spoken language. Alphabet books, these simple structures are Rosette stones for the illiterate, transferring them from the purely oral world to the written one.

An alphabet book lists and illustrates the entire alphabet. It provides a context for the alphabet and in this sense it is the fusion of technology with human behavior; if speech is a natural outgrowth like hands for information, then the alphabet is a prosthetic to speech. A long line of letters removes the necessary human voice.

I don't believe I had ever seen a lion or xylophone or unicorn before I began to learn to read, but then I'd also never heard an A separate from an E--suddenly speech revieled that words could be broken down into mysterious parts, as startling as the discovery years later that human bodies broke down into bone and organs and blood.

the
alphabet
song

2) These two variables do not do a very good job of explaining the variance in scores measuring children's understanding of the orthographic patterns of written English. Phonemic awareness rarely developed in the absence of the letter name knowledge. Instructionally the implications are that experimentation with paper and pen may be as important to the literary development of children as reading.

I remember writing my last name on the chalk board in school. Five of us stood under the tall, dusty slate while Mr. Johnson, the husband part of the couple that taught my kindergarten class, patiently called out the letters to my name. B and I sang the song, shooting past the first character, ABCDEFG.. AB and then I pictured the letter and traced out its shape on the wide dusty space. R and I stumbled down the row of letters, abdcedfghijklmnopqR to R for Briggs and slowly I moved through my name and it seemed like such work and confusion because outside it was sunny. Outside the sky was filled with puffy white clouds headed toward the Cascade Mountains, and piles of orange leaves, that would crunch when I stepped on them, filled the deep crevices of the maple tree roots; I stood inside under the green slate with its long wooden dish filled with decades of chalk dust and my fingers were sore from gripping the point of the white chalk like a canine tooth and I sang out the alphabet to write my name abcdefghI. And when my name stood out on the board, I recognized the shape and I felt myself pull my lips around those dangling gs and the trailing slope of my S -- BRIGGS -- which was me and there I was on the green slate in the room under the flickering florescent lights. There YOU are, Mr. Johnson said and I sat back in my seat.

I had the alphabet and now I had my name and I went home to claim everything with words in it. I wrote my name, MATT BRIGGS on the loose leaf side of every book in the black bookcases my uncle had made for my mother.

I have a callous on my index finger from writing. It developed in the first grade, leaving splotches of blood on the bluish wide ruled paper I used to practiced the wide loops of my Palmer Script. I labored over each letter of the alphabet, grounding the song into my brain and the shape of the words into my fingers.

Presented here is a Hypertext Alphabet Book. With the ABCs and the spoken word names of the characters. Explore it for a minute and I think you will find that in mapping spoken language to written language, we are building what James Joyce calls the ABCDE-minded, the linear mind. It may be an artificial construct, but two thousand years have refined a powerful mnemonic tool that hypertext can only parody.

	THE RaVEN CHRONICLES
	A Hypertext Alphabet Matt Briggs "Before them, on the screen... in an orange computer font--Garamond Antigua--were the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet, as perfect and simple as atoms must have seemed when Democritus (she thought) imagined them, those simple squiggles of which arguments were formed, those squiggles that divided houses and united them, that were arranged into words intoned over baptisms and death... Words were civilization!" RICK MOODY Purple America, 1997
The alphabetic principal is how spoken language is mapped into written language. 1) Significant amount of variance in understanding of the alphabetical principal can be explained by phonemic awareness and letter name knowledge.	The mnemonic song of the alphabet is probably the only song I sing each day. Each time I use the mailboxes at work, I mutter the first letter of the person's last name and I sing the ABCs to place the name Gilland, abcdefG and I find the name-slot the slot. Otherwise, it could be anywhere. The alphabet book teaches letter shapes and sounds and help students map the written language to their spoken language. Alphabet books, these simple structures are Rosette stones for the illiterate, transferring them from the purely oral world to the written one. An alphabet book lists and illustrates the entire alphabet. It provides a context for the alphabet and in this sense it is the fusion of technology with human behavior; if speech is a natural outgrowth like hands for information, then the alphabet is a prosthetic to speech. A long line of letters removes the necessary human voice. I don't believe I had ever seen a lion or xylophone or unicorn before I began to learn to read, but then I'd also never heard an A separate from an E--suddenly speech revieled that words could be broken down into mysterious parts, as startling as the discovery years later that human bodies broke down into bone and organs and blood.	the alphabet song
2) These two variables do not do a very good job of explaining the variance in scores measuring children's understanding of the orthographic patterns of written English. Phonemic awareness rarely developed in the absence of the letter name knowledge. Instructionally the implications are that experimentation with paper and pen may be as important to the literary development of children as reading.	I remember writing my last name on the chalk board in school. Five of us stood under the tall, dusty slate while Mr. Johnson, the husband part of the couple that taught my kindergarten class, patiently called out the letters to my name. B and I sang the song, shooting past the first character, ABCDEFG.. AB and then I pictured the letter and traced out its shape on the wide dusty space. R and I stumbled down the row of letters, abdcedfghijklmnopqR to R for Briggs and slowly I moved through my name and it seemed like such work and confusion because outside it was sunny. Outside the sky was filled with puffy white clouds headed toward the Cascade Mountains, and piles of orange leaves, that would crunch when I stepped on them, filled the deep crevices of the maple tree roots; I stood inside under the green slate with its long wooden dish filled with decades of chalk dust and my fingers were sore from gripping the point of the white chalk like a canine tooth and I sang out the alphabet to write my name abcdefghI. And when my name stood out on the board, I recognized the shape and I felt myself pull my lips around those dangling gs and the trailing slope of my S -- BRIGGS -- which was me and there I was on the green slate in the room under the flickering florescent lights. There YOU are, Mr. Johnson said and I sat back in my seat. I had the alphabet and now I had my name and I went home to claim everything with words in it. I wrote my name, MATT BRIGGS on the loose leaf side of every book in the black bookcases my uncle had made for my mother. I have a callous on my index finger from writing. It developed in the first grade, leaving splotches of blood on the bluish wide ruled paper I used to practiced the wide loops of my Palmer Script. I labored over each letter of the alphabet, grounding the song into my brain and the shape of the words into my fingers. Presented here is a Hypertext Alphabet Book. With the ABCs and the spoken word names of the characters. Explore it for a minute and I think you will find that in mapping spoken language to written language, we are building what James Joyce calls the ABCDE-minded, the linear mind. It may be an artificial construct, but two thousand years have refined a powerful mnemonic tool that hypertext can only parody.