My general beefs with WordPress: part 2

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Written by Catherin J Pascal Dunk

Today we’ll be looking at the WordPress verse block.

In two of my earlier blog posts, in the series ‘WordPress hacks for poetry’, I delved into the issues of default double spacing between lines, and forced single spaces between words within lines.

Some of y’all1 kindly let me know about the existence of the verse block. I’ve tried it now, and yes, it does make line breaks easier and look better! You can get single line spacing by simply hitting Enter — no need to also hold down your Shift key. That’s good! The verse block also allows you to use spacing in quirky ways within lines of verse — and they will stay in place once you publish! Huzzah! I wondered how those few poets were doing their fancy layouts and assumed they were just much better nerds than I … but maybe they also did a ‘how to use WordPress’ tutorial or something … I tend to prefer fumbling in the dark and complaining as my modus operandi … [shrugs apologetically; hey, don’t be ableist peepl].

So now that I’ve had a chance to play around with the verse block a bit, guess what? Complaints/suggestion box time.

Yes, it does for sure make line breaks easier and look better. Thank you! And I can now use gaps within my lines of verse easily too … fancy cutting and pasting of nonbreaking spaces across from Word is no longer required.

Unfortunately it also forces all my verse to appear in italics. Wtf — why, Matt?!

And there seems to be no way to override it … believe me, I’ve tried. Even if you set everything in your draft as italics, that won’t cancel it out.

Contrary to popular belief, Mattites, not all poets are enamoured with italics.

What we do love, though, is creative control — and choices!

What if I wanted to set a single word in italics in my verse block? What then, Matt?

Here is what:

Happily writing my poem    and the spaces hold within lines, 
which is so        freeing     so       lovely!
and the line spacing is so neat — it's defo2 not double!

But I'm pretty pissed off about the forced italics tbh.

And it's then I realise, Matt, 
that I can't even set a word off ---3 to emphasise it —4
in <itals>italics</itals>.

Well, I suppose I could use bold! 
But I don't want to rn.
I want to be dramatic af. 

To be a squeaky-wheel-that-gets-some-grease.

And So.

I'm going to use ALL CAPS MATT, SHOUTY CAPS
SORRY IN ADVANCE, NO ONE LIKES BEING SHOUTED AT 
BUT ITALICS, COME ON! ITALICS!
A POET NEEDS TO BE ABLE TO USE THEM, 
TO FLEX!

Fix it, people? PLEASE.

P.S. Why is the HOWDY still there? Maybe I got over-entitled, but I've come to expect a certain high level of responsiveness from y'all. Whassup? TQM it, or somethink. Continuous-improvement it. Or get me onboarded as staff already and I can crash-school myself in code and fix it myself maybe? How's that sound Matt? Oh and howdy (belatedly).
P.P.S. Thank you Autumn for getting the weasel words5 thing dumpstered so beautifully quickly! That li'l' chestnut was just so UBER mean and judgy.
P.P.P.S. Image is from Pexels Free Photos.
  1. See, I don’t hate all Americanisms. I use them when they’re handy, sensible and gender-neutral. ↩︎
  2. Definitely (Australianism). ↩︎
  3. Ugh, my em-dash hack of using three hyphen dashes doesn’t work in the verse block, either! They won’t join up. ↩︎
  4. This one is cut and pasted from Word… ↩︎
  5. When you used to type a modal verb* such as might, could, should etc, WordPress for a short while there was underlining it and telling you, if you hovered, that you were being a weasel! Using weasel words, anyway. Being shifty, dodgy. And encouraging you to use more forceful, direct (masculine) language. This was interesting because modals are highly associated with polite language, which is also the language of WOMEN … so it was an (I’m sure unintentional) act of internalised misogyny from someone at WordPress — who wouldn’t have realised this — to warn people off using modals. WordPress is all about wanting to share as many diverse voices as possible, surely? Hence the pretty much free platform for the same.
    * I know so much about the nitty gritty of language as I’m a linguistics major, Matt. Well, double major with Psychology. In fact, bit of a polymath, as probably you are, too. I learn about everything that interests me and go in quite deep. Qualifications up the wazoo. Check out my LinkedIn. ↩︎

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5 Comments

  2. Hi, Catherin! Nice to see you’re trying out the Verse block, and that it’s almost dialed in to how you like it. By default the block should certainly be unstyled, and display in whatever your base font style is (just like normal paragraphs).

    In this case, on your site there appears to be a CSS style for `.wp-block-verse` that is setting `font-style: italic;`. I’m unsure if this is being set by your theme or the Customizer. In the Customizer you could try adding this to the end of the Additional CSS to see if it helps: `.wp-block-verse { font-style: inherit; }` <– this should override the italic setting and default Verse blocks to the style of their parent elements.

    The folks who work on the WordPress editor are always open to feedback and improving usability of blocks, so thank you for taking the time to share your experience and spreading the word on what’s working for you!

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