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Writing for Online Media
Professor Nicholas Leshi
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Assignment Deadlines
Every Week – At least one new blog entry
Every Week – Read fellow classmates’ blogs and comment where appropriate
Every Week – Read assignment listed in syllabus
February 25 – Mid-Term Paper Due (“Blog Reviews”)
Before April 1– “Guest Post Assignment” Due(Guest entry on someone else’s blog or Web site)
On or before May 6 – Final Paper Due (Your experience as an online writer and
your thoughts on the future of online writing)
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Presentation of Blogs and Mission Statements
http://writingforonlinemedia-classwiki.wikispaces.com/
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Avoiding Common Writing Mistakes
Make your subjects, objects, and verbs agree.(“My sister is smarter than me.” )
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Avoiding Common Writing Mistakes
Be consistent with the tense.(“Yesterday I had a dream. I’m flying over a field of dandelions.”)
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Avoiding Common Writing Mistakes
Make pronouns and antecedents agree.(“Everyone should know their limit.”)
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Avoiding Common Writing Mistakes
Use apostrophes and contractions properly.(its and it’s, your and you’re, should’ve, could’ve, would’ve. etc.)
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Avoiding Common Writing Mistakes
Be careful with similar words. (e.g. and i.e., affect and effect, then and than, etc.)
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Avoiding Common Writing Mistakes
Avoid ending a sentence or phrase with a preposition.(“I know it’s hard not to.”)
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Avoiding Common Writing Mistakes
Try not to split infinitives.(“to boldly go”)
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Avoiding Common Writing Mistakes
Avoid unnecessary repetition.(“Baseball is my favorite sport. I love baseball. I try to go to as many baseball games as I can.”)
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Avoiding Common Writing Mistakes
Rules can be broken, but first know the rules.
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Web 2.0
“The term (Web 2.0) is meant to characterize a second generation of Web sites. The first wave of Web developers focused largely on publishing content. Web 2.0, on the other hand, develops services that allow users to share their own content and to use the Web as a platform.”
– Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging
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The Media Shift
“(Blogs) are part of a larger context. They are part of the history of communication and literacy, and emblematic of a shift from uni-directional mass media to participatory media, where viewers and readers become creators of media.”
– Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging
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The Importance of Aesthetics in New Media
“A literary critic will rarely see the binding of a book as being important to its literary quality. A blog, however, cannot be read simply for its writing, but will always be seen as the sum of writing, layout, connections and links, and tempo.”
– Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging
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Online Navigation
“The word ‘blog’ is a contraction of the words ‘Web’ and ‘log.’... The word ‘log’ is taken from nautical navigation, and originally referred to a chronological record of events during a sea journey…The implicit transfer of the navigation metaphor to the Web is fitting, as people… tended to talk about ‘navigating’ (and ‘surfing’) the Web.”
– Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging
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Three Characteristics of Blogging
“Three characteristics…define blogging: frequency, brevity, and personality. This triad refers to the familiar though not uncontroversial rules for good writing: clarity, brevity, and sincerity. – Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging
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Frequency
Blogs consist of frequent posts.
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Brevity
Blogs consist of relatively brief posts.
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Personality
Most important, blog posts are personal (even when anonymous).
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The Social Nature of Blogging
“Blogs are social. Most blogs allow and encourage readers to leave comments, and almost all use links to link to sources and to other bloggers discussing similar topics.” – Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging
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Online Writing for Everyone
“Early bloggers hand-coded their sites, meaning that they had to create their blogs from scratch and edit raw HTML code, or use a visual HTML editor like Dreamweaver, each time they updated the blog…(WYSIWYG blogging platforms) opened up blogging to regular people.” – Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging
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Online Writing Pioneers
“Even prior to the success of the World Wide Web, some computer scientists had turned their attention to hypertext.”
– Jay David Bolter, Writing Space
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Hypertext and Hyperlinks
“Hypertext is a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.”
– Ted Nelson, 1965 Computer and Information Visionary
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Hypertext and Hyperlinks
“Hypertext means forms of writing which branch or perform on request; they are best represented on computer display screens…Hypertexts consist of separate pieces of text connected by links.”
– Ted Nelson, 1970
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Qualities of Print vs. Qualities of Online Media
In the heyday of print, we came to regard the written text as an unchanging artifact, a monument to its author and its age. We also tended to magnify the distance between the author and the reader, as the author became a monumental figure, the reader only a visitor in the author’s cathedral.
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Qualities of Print vs. Qualities of Online Media
In the current “late age” of print, however, we seem more impressed by the impermanence and changeability of text, and digital technology seems to reduce the distance between author and reader by turning the reader into an author him-or-herself.
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Dangers of the Qualities of New Media
The shift to the computer may make writing more flexible, but it also threatens the definitions of ‘good writing’ and ‘careful reading’ that have developed in association with the technique of printing.
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Visuals vs. Text
Digital media may also challenge alphabetic writing in any form…Although printed books, newspapers, and magazines can and do combine graphics with text, new digital media seem often to favor graphics at the expense of text.
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Visuals vs. Text
“The question is whether alphabetic texts can compete effectively with the visual and aural sensorium that surrounds us.”
– Jay David Bolter, Writing Space
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Hypertextual Writing
“Hypertextual writing can go further (than traditional print writing), because it can change for each reader and with each reading. Authors can exploit the dynamic quality of hypertext to alter the nature of an audience’s shared experience in reading.”
– Jay David Bolter, Writing Space
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The Experience of Reading Online
The continuous flow of words and pages in the printed book is supplanted in electronic space by abrupt changes of direction and tempo, as the user interacts with a web page or other interface.
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The Linear Nature of Traditional Reading and Writing
Linear writing is appropriate to print technology both because the printed page readily accommodates linear text and because our culture expects that printed prose should be linear. Other styles may be appropriate to digital technology.
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Remediation
“Remediation (typically understood as the correction of something) also refers to a newer medium taking the place of an older one, borrowing and reorganizing the characteristics of writing in the older medium and reforming its cultural space.”
– Jay David Bolter, Writing Space
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Remediation
Remediation involves both homage and rivalry, for the new medium imitates some features of the older medium, but also makes an implicit or explicit claim to improve on the older one.
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Links
On the World Wide Web, one page can be linked electronically to many others. In one sense this linking is simply the electronic equivalent of the footnote and endnotes used in printed books for hundreds of years. Instead of looking to the bottom of the page or the end of the book, the reader positions the cursor, and the computer retrieves and displays the reference.
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Links
There is an important difference between print footnotes and online links: the second Web page can also contain linked phrases that in turn lead the reader to other Web pages. The process can continue indefinitely as the reader moves through a textual space that, in the case of the World Wide Web, can extend throughout the Internet.
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Links
Furthermore, the second page is not necessarily subordinate to the first. All the individual pages may be of equal importance in the whole text, which becomes a network of interconnected writings.
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Hypertext
Such a network is called a hypertext, and it is the creation and presentation of such hypertextual structures that seem to constitute a new form of writing.
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HTML
HTML = HyperText Markup Language
HTML is the predominant markup language for Web pages, the basic building blocks of Web pages.
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“The Matrix”
A Web browser or software application reads HTML documents and composes them into visual or audible Web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page.
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HTTP
HTTP =Hypertext Transfer Protocol
HTTP is a networking protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. It is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web.
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Differences Between Traditional Text and Hypertext
Where traditional genres are linear or hierarchical, hypertext is multiple and associative. Where a printed text is static, a hypertext responds to the reader’s touch. The reader can move through a hypertext document in a variety of reading orders.
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Which Is Better?
Whether multilinearity and interactivity really do render hypertext better than print is a cultural determination. The question becomes: better in what sense, for whose purposes, and as various contemporary critics would immediately ask, for whose economic benefit?
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The Print vs. Online Debate
The supporters of digital media argue that hypertext reflects the nature of the human mind itself – that because we think associatively, not linearly, hypertext allows us to write as we think.
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The Print vs. Online Debate
The supporters of print argue that by its definition, digital communication is outside of nature and abandons some of the “deep thinking” benefits that print communication has brought to civilization as we know it.
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Interdependency of Print and Digital Media
In this “late age” of print, the two technologies (print and electronic writing) still need each other. Print forms the tradition upon which electronic writing depends, and electronic writing is that which goes beyond print. Print is becoming hypermediated in order to hold its readers, incorporating verbal genres and gestures in self-conscious imitation of and rivalry with electronic media, especially the World Wide Web.
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Some Common HTML Tags
<html> </html> Creates an HTML document
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Some Common HTML Tags
<head> </head> Sets off the title and other information
that isn’t displayed on the Web page itself.
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Some Common HTML Tags
<body> </body> Sets off the visible portion of the document.
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Some Common HTML Tags
<body bgcolor=“pink”> Sets the background color
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Some Common HTML Tags
<body text=“black”> Sets the text color (name or hex value)
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Some Common HTML Tags
<a href=“URL”> </a> Creates a hyperlink
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Some Common HTML Tags
<body link=“blue”> Sets the color of links
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Some Common HTML Tags
<body vlink=“#ff0000”> Sets the color of followed links
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Some Common HTML Tags
<b> </b> Creates bold text
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Some Common HTML Tags
<i> </i> Creates italic text
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Some Common HTML Tags
<font size=“3”> </font> Sets size of font.
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Some Common HTML Tags
<font color=“green”> </font> Sets font color
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Some Common HTML Tags, continued
<a href=“mailto:EMAIL”> </a> Creates a “mailto” link
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Some Common HTML Tags, continued
<a href=“URL”><img src=“URL”> </a> Creates an image-link
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Some Common HTML Tags, continued
<h1>, <h2>, <h3> Creates headers
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Some Common HTML Tags, continued
<ul>, <ol> and <li> Creates lists
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Some Common HTML Tags, continued
<p> </p>Creates a new paragraph
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Writing in the Digital Age
“Readers of a printed book can write over or deface the text, but they cannot write in it…In the electronic medium, however, readers cannot avoid writing the text itself, because every choice they make is an act of writing.”
– Jay David Bolter, Writing Space
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Avoid Using “Empty” Words
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Examples of “Empty” Words
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Examples of “Empty” Words
Very
Really
Good
Bad
Awesome
Get
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Assignments Due Next Class
Post at least one new entry in your blog.
Read your classmates’ blogs and comment where/when appropriate.
Read Chapter 2 of the required text, Blogging by Jill Walker Rettberg.
Have fun.
