You can do better than write a scholarly article, an informative report, or a popular book. You can create an ortext. All the content and code for the Communicating with Prisoners ortext are available for you to consider, to try design experiments, and to use. Be a pioneer in twenty-first-century communication of arts, sciences, and human knowledge.

The ortext code has a modular design. You can choose to use only some elements of it. You might find some of the elements useful for work other than creating an ortext.

Include bibliographic citations in your work

If you’re serious about knowledge, you should provide explicit references to other sources of knowledge. The Ortext BibTex Importer plugin provides a way to import bibliographic entries into a custom post type. You can use it out of the box with only a little technical knowledge. The BibTex Importer is crufty. It surely is not the best way today to maintain an online bibliography integrated with WordPress. But it will do its simple job using the well-established BibTex reference format.

If you learn more about web programming, or already have such knowledge, you could explore better ways to integrate WordPress content with online bibliographic repositories.

Include citation-point information when internally linking to other WordPress content

When you refer a reader to another web page, particularly with an inline textual link, the reader may not know what specifically is relevant on the linked page. Citation-point information displayed dynamically at the top of the page helps the reader to find the relevant point. A simple example is the relevant page number in a link to a bibliographic record.

The Ortext Formatting plugin enables passing citation-point information through the link URL. To format better and more easily citation information passed through a link URL, you can use internal key linking.

Include links to datasets hosted outside of WordPress

Numbers are commonly used merely as rhetorical weapons. If you want to present numbers credibly, you should provide as much data as possible so that others can independently analyze the data. Others should be able to consider your analysis from many different perspectives and find in the data reality that you did not recognize.

Consider, for example, spreadsheets. Spreadsheets aren’t a really serious data tool. But they can hold much more data than is typically provided with scholarly articles, policy reports, or books. Moreover, spreadsheets are commonly used. If your analysis of data fits in a spreadsheet, you should share the whole spreadsheet.

The Ortext Datalinks plugin provides a simple way to link to  multiple versions or differently hosted instances of a dataset such as a spreadsheet. You can install and use the Ortext Datalinks plugin without using any other ortext code. You can also use it support links to content other than datasets.

Design your content deliberately

Scholarly articles, analytical reports, and popular books have highly conventional forms established in the era of printed texts. With the Internet and tools like WordPress, you can design content much better than simply creating a digital version of a printed content form. For some stimulus to thought about long-form content design, ponder the basic ideas for the ortext design. Then create something better.