Let Tuesday forever onward be
RUDESDAY
The Day We Write In Rudigraph!
Let all of our texts, our Tweets, our status posts, our yet-unnamed written effluvia be written on this day of the week in Rudigraph: The Rudimental Orthography.
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The Rules
of Rudigraph are easy!
1 Letters and Numbers Only
There is no punctuation in Rudigraph, save the Unimark [see rule 4].
{ In technical terms, Rudigraph allows only phonographic graphemes — characters that you can read aloud. }
2 No Case
In Rudigraph there is only one form per letter.
{ SOME PEOPLE LIKE MAJISCULE (UPPER CASE). some people like miniscule (lower case). In Rudigraph it doesn't matter which you use, as long as you only use one or the other. }
3 Words
Are separated by horizontal space.
4 Sentences
Are separated inside of a paragraph by a Unimark.
{What's a Unimark? The unimark is any punctuation character you choose, and the only punctuation character you use. It can be a period, hyphen-dash, slash, asterisk — whatever you think looks good.}
5 Paragraphs
Are separated by vertical spaces.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
What does it look like?
THIS PARAGRAPH IS AN EXAMPLE OF RUDIGRAPH · THE PREFERENCE OF THE AUTHOR IS FOR MAJISCULE GLYPHS · HE USES THE MIDDLE DOT FOR A UNIMARK · YOU MIGHT WONDER HOW ONE POSES A QUESTION WITHOUT QUESTION MARKS · YOU MIGHT FURTHERMORE WONDER HOW ONE SHOWS POSESSION WITHOUT APOSTROPHES · THESE ARE SOME OF THE CONSIDERATIONS ONE MUST MAKE WHEN THEY WRITE IN RUDIGRAPH
[Irritating use of indefinite pronouns is not required.]
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Why should we do this?
Because it's fun! Because it makes us think differently about what we're writing. And because it has an attractive minimalist aesthetic.
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You might be thinking,
doesn't Kanye West already do this?
No, Kanye West does not do this. While it is true that many people write texts and Tweets and statuses entirely in either caps or lowercase, and often use no punctuation, most do not do this conscientiously, and most do not do it artfully. Rudigraph isn't about ignoring or rejecting rules of grammar and punctuation — quite the opposite! Rudigraph is an exercise to help you think about how important the rules of grammar and punctuation are in writing clearly. Rudigraph imperils your writing with ambiguity, and forces you to rely on word choice and phrasing for clarity. There's no better way to appreciate the usefulness of a tool than to try and make-do without it.
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How to begin:
Write a Rudigram! Send an email, submit a Usenet article, post a microblog, hammer-out a memorandum on your mechanical typewriter, and write it in Rudigraph.
If you want to do more reading before you write, have a gander at Rudigraph: A Simple Orthography for Fun and Insight, the document describing Rudigraph, written in Rudigraph.
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