By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 1, 2004; Page D01

Neterature: writing on and for the Internet.

• Not always in complete sentences.

• Often with bullets.

• Not a lot of punctuation but a great deal of self-exploration you know

• case often lower when should be upper and Vice Versa.

• Rife with misteaks -- easily corrected but mor often not.

• Full of attitude and not always kind. Sometimes sinister and fraught with swear words. Othertimes saccharine and spangled with winking, smiley-face emoticons.

;-) Neterature: all the quirky, jerky kinds of writing that is/are on the World Wide Web -- blogs, fan fiction, role-playing game sagas, news filterese, spam poetry, prose parodies, etc.

Neterature: Usually energetic passionate innovative and irreverently funny. Not always great or even good. But the best of it is young and sassy and undeniably full of life, in ways that on-the-page writing is not so much anymore.

And it's blooming everywhere -- in e-mail and instant messages and, more and more, spilling off the screen into our daily parlance. It's changing the way we express ourselves.

Jakob Nielsen, a California Web consultant who teaches folks how to write for the online world, says, "The last few years have seen the emergence of new writing forms on the Internet, characterized by two elements: brevity and hyperlinking."

People write shorter, and they lead readers to other sites through clickable links, he says. By definition, this link-sprinkling distracts the reader, drawing him away from the writing.

"There always was tension about whether to put links directly in the text," says Jodie Allen, Washington editor of Slate from 1996 to 1999. "The fear was that people would jump away and not come back."

People do jump, so new forms of grabby writing are springing up.

Nielsen explains that the cost-benefit ratios of reading something online and reading something in print are vastly different. On the Web, "you have literally billions of pages of info at your fingertips." It doesn't pay to spend a whole lot of time with each page.

"The Web doesn't have Nobel Prize-winning content. It doesn't reward you with incredibly deep insight," Nielsen says. So you surf to the next site. "The cost of moving on is minuscule."

Compare that experience, Nielsen says, with reading something in a favorite magazine. The magazine has been edited to meet the reader's expectations. "The style and content and topics and quality are all going to be to my liking," Nielsen says. "The benefit is likely to be high."

The cost of finding another magazine that is of equal benefit, however, would be great. You'd have to get in your car and go to the newsstand and buy another magazine and come back home and return to your chair before you could begin reading another story.

The cost-benefit analyses vary wildly. "The difference is so big. What you would think of as being the same medium," Nielsen says, "is not."

Sure. Old forms abound on the Internet.

Epic poems and sonnets and haiku. Here's a haiku from the Genuine Haiku Generator (www.everypoet.com), an online program that tosses words together according to syllable:

formlessly laughing abyss emerges mildly patiently, nude dead Okay, so it's not Basho. But it does adhere to traditional form.

Five-seven-five syllables. And it's so easy, even a monkey can do it. All it takes is one click on the "New Haiku" button to create what the site calls a "cyberpseudopoetic masterpiece." Accent on the pseudo.

And you can find long prose on the Internet. Most of it was not written for a clickable medium. "There's a lot of old-style writing," Nielsen says. "A majority of Web sites are dominated by straight dumps of dead-tree information."

But that is changing. At Web speed, humans are creating -- and stumbling upon -- innovative ways to express ourselves online:

• Blogs. Web logs, which are personal online diary-like sites, get a lot of attention. Old-medium writers such as Andrew Sullivan, former editor of the New Republic magazine (www.andrewsullivan.com), have turned to the Web. The Internet has also made bloggers out of unlikely participants, including Barbra Streisand, Fred Durst and Avril Lavigne. The musician Moby keeps a running journal on his site (www.moby.com). Funny guy Dave Barry warps the Web his way (davebarry.blogspot.com). Novelist William Gibson occasionally blogs between novels (www.williamgibsonbooks.com). And the Web is awobble with personal blogs from around the world, set up through countless clearinghouses such as BlogSpot (new.blogger.com/blogspot-admin). The writing is personal and pointed. Here's a recent excerpt -- errors and all -- labeled "The State of Our Union Is Lousy," from the blog of Eliot Danner (homepage.mac.com/eliotdanner), a 20-year-old international studies major at George Washington University: "BUT there is light at the end of the rainbow, tonight was the first time that I saw him looking as if he didn't have much confidence in the message, the speech was dry and dull he left with no talking points. I mean what kind of an issue is steroids? Hes loosing it, and that is a good thing. The aura of the untouchable numbers is fading, he was struggling there to hold the audience. Also, he still doesn't know how to use a telepormpter. Thank god!" Danner says, "Blogging is great. I'm able to say exactly what I think about George Bush."

• Fan fiction. Scores and scores of fiction fans have found a way to participate in the lives of their favorite books, movies, TV shows, cartoons and video games. They write story lines, called fanfic. And within fanfic, you find subgenres, such as sexually charged "slash writing," which is for mature audiences only.

On Fanfiction.net you'll find homespun sequels, prequels and spinoffs of everything from "Harry Potter" and "Star Trek" to "Queer as Folk," "American Pie" and "Max Payne," the video game.

Xing Li, a 26-year-old software developer in Alhambra, Calif., founded the site in 1998. To date, some 180,000 fanfictioneers have taken advantage of the opportunity. A few authors, including Anne Rice and Nora Roberts, have objected to the genre. (Rice says she is still developing her characters and doesn't need any amateur assistance.) Xing Li's site does not archive stories based on their works. The genre is distinct, Xing Li says, because stories are written for predefined worlds and audiences. "Even that aspect has been stretched," he says, "as writers create brand new worlds with only small details tied to the original world."

Here is a short story -- bad punctuation and spelling included -- based on the mindless computer game Minesweeper:

-The Tale of Joe - By Nazi Janitor One day, Joe Schmo, decided to quit his job of being a taco salesman. But, he had no idea what to be. Then he saw an ad in the paper: "DUDE BECOME A MINESWEEPER AND SWEEP MINES. NOTE: YOU MIGHT DIE BUT WHO CARES?!?!?!?!".

"Hyuck hyuck hyuck, this is thuh kinda job I'm looking for, hyuck." Joe said to himself.

Joe was hired. But sadly, he was killed buy a mine because he selected the wrong box. And because he was a smiley, his eyes turned into X's and his face exploded because he sucks at life. The End.

Not Tolstoy, but you get the idea.

• Role-Playing Games, a popular Internet pastime in which people assume other identities and interact as characters, are seedbeds for new-form neterature. Astonia, for instance, is described by its creators as a "massively multiplayer online role playing game."

Each player, the rules explain, chooses to be "a battle-hardened warrior or a powerful mage." In Astonia (www.astonia.com), the player undergoes battle training and "the experience gained as characters solve quests, discover new places, and kill evil monsters, can be applied to raise any of a large number of attributes, skills and spells. Characters gain rank and power, qualifying them for better and more powerful equipment for the new and greater challenges that lie ahead." One of the greatest challenges is writing anything pithy while the game is being played. Many of the comments found on the games' sample pages consist of gruntly prose such as "hi everyone!" and "hi zoe :)"

There are moments of fancy: "You have been frozen by ice demon. You feel like you'll never thaw again." And "dimples, you still got an orb at my shop ;)"

• News Filterese. Scattered throughout the Internet are witty, wiseacre sites that troll the Web for news. Some are looking for political stories, others for sports info. And then there are vibrant, visionary sites such as Metafilter.com and Fark.com that are often ahead of the conventional curve. From Lexington, Ky., Drew Curtis oversees the latter (www.fark.com), an irreverent, mature-audience site that seeks out -- and attracts -- witty, weird, wired and worldwide news on the Internet and posts it, with discernible farkian attitude.

As introduction to a Bloomberg wire story about former Tampa Bay Buccaneers wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson being robbed at gunpoint in Berkeley, Calif., Fark.com posted this paragraph: "Thieves, knowing that he couldn't catch them even in the unlikelihood that he could out run them, mug Keyshawn Johnson." This was next to a link to the news story and a link to a message board about the news item.

That tagline, like most of the prose on the site, was provided by a reader who has caught on to Curtis's wry style. A 31-year-old database consultant, Curtis describes the summaries as "kind of like 'Daily Show' lead-ins."

• Spam Poetry. Kristin Thomas uses the strange lines from spam-mail to quilt together new poems. Here is an excerpt from a recent work:

Men don't love the fat gals My husband gave me a pill This pill fixed everything I lost 40 lbs in 6 weeks and you can too.

Are you happy being alone?

lose it Nobody ever died on THIS pill I want you to be Happy, Maggie.

She explains on her site (www.sperare.com) that Maggie, her dog, gets a lot of junk e-mail.

• Prose parodies. The online community surrounding the newspaper feature "The Straight Dope" posted a question on its Web site, www.teemings.com/extras/lotr, asking: What if "Lord of the Rings" had been written by someone else? The response was tsunamic. More than 1,000 people weighed in with prose parodies of everyone from Dante to Louisa May Alcott.

Here's a Dr. Seuss entry:

Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring! I am too small to carry this thing!

I can not, will not hold the One. You have a slim chance, but I have none. I will not take it on a boat, I will not take it across a moat. I cannot take it under Moria, that's one thing I can't do for ya. I would not bring it into Mordor, I would not make it to the border.

When you're sitting at a computer and reading Seussian poesy, says neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak, author of "The New Brain: How the Modern Age Is Rewiring Your Mind," "you're looking at a visual media. You're using the same part of your brain you use to watch TV."

As a result, you respond differently to the screen than you do to paper. It brings out different aspects of the brain. People writing on the Internet, Restak says, tend to be "laconic, and overly rude."

He adds: "Your critical faculties are in abeyance."

The technology is changing the way we think. And act.

Some of it may be for the better. It is, after all, a complicated world, and perhaps we are discovering new ways to deal with -- and explore -- complex, multi-level media. Middle-school kids who instant-message incessantly while they study either learn to juggle writing tasks or suffer as a result.

Some of the changes may be for the worse. Barraged by bits and bytes, people are being reprogrammed to write and speak in shorter sentences, Restak says. The brain is losing its ability to keep track of complex phrases and clauses.

So even if we want to read -- or write -- more textured, complex prose, we may not be able to. The result is slapdash, small-vocab, shallow, callow writing that seems to be devolving with the technology rather than evolving.

And, because we are no longer crafting our stories and poems on paper with pens or typewriters, gone are the days when we were forced to think through everything before we wrote it down.

On one side of the equation, today's engineers have made it eerily easy for writers to write -- certainly more rapidly and, some would say, more creatively and innovatively.

On the other, maybe the easier we make it to write, the worse some of the writing gets.