Written Language & Typographic Convention

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Abstractions about how written text is composed, formatted, and read — orthographic and shorthand encoding systems like spelling and the stroke count method, typographic layout conventions such as indentation, sentence spacing, and widows and orphans, and the cognitive processes of word recognition, guessing, and writing.

11 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Characters per line — The maximum or typical count of monospaced character cells available on one displayed or printed line.
• Indentation (typesetting) — The use of controlled blank space at a text boundary to signal paragraphing, hierarchy, quotation or another structural role.
• Sentence spacing in digital media — The typographic control of horizontal separation after sentence-ending punctuation in variable-font and web environments, including single, enlarged, fixed and nonbreaking spacing conventions.
• Shorthand — A writing system that encodes speech or language with abbreviated symbols, strokes or spellings to increase recording speed and reduce inscription length.
• Spelling — The conventional mapping of words and morphemes into ordered written graphemes under a language-specific orthography.
• Stroke count method — A Chinese-character input method that encodes a character by the ordered sequence of a small number of stroke-type categories rather than by pronunciation.
• Widows and orphans — Typographic line-break defects in which too little of a paragraph is stranded at a column or page boundary, disrupting reading continuity and visual balance.
• Word guessing — A context-based reading strategy in which an unfamiliar written word is provisionally inferred from sentence, picture, or discourse cues and the guess is checked against subsequent meaning or print.
• Word recognition — The reading process of identifying a written word accurately and increasingly automatically from its orthographic form.
• Writer's block — A nonmedical state of sustained difficulty initiating or continuing writing despite an intention and opportunity to write.
• Writing process — The recursive set of cognitive, social and material activities through which a writer develops, composes, revises and delivers a text.