Readers' Expectations And Writers' Goals In The Late Age Of Print

Most of us are very comfortable acknowledging that reading and writing electronic texts is now firmly a well-established part of our everyday life, but we only occasionally examine the generational differences between our grandparents' notions of text and our children's. This is largely because our demographic is a transitional one, caught between a well-learned familiarity with hardcopy texts and the challenge of intense movements to online environments. This paper traces our movement from hardcopy texts to digital texts, and speculates about how readers' and writers' expectations of texts are being transformed by emerging technologies. Specifically, digital texts are erasing traditional distinctions between written and spoken discourse, increasing the interconnectedness of texts, increasing the demand for user control over texts, integrating various modes of communication, and intensifying the relationship between readers and writers. KEYWORDS Electronic Texts; Literacy; Hypermedi..