Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning (archived site)

Web Writing in the University Community: Problem Solving through Collaboration and Convergence

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 The academic study of web writing has emerged as an intrinsic component of twenty-first century professional writing and rhetoric. Today, web writers occupy the virtual spaces created by converging technologies and cultural industries in what amounts to a new location for the public sphere concept, a sphere in which the political and the popular merge. As an interactive virtual space the web necessitates, by its very structure, opportunities for rhetoric and writing that draw upon a convergence of media and the potential for new modes of collaboration, modes that redraw the way we map writing in both the academy and the public square from a global perspective. Web writing recognizes a paradigm shift in the ways people have adapted writing strategies to the digital environment with respect to content and interactivity. ¹ Through this “convergence culture” users read, write, and respond to other writers in rhetorical situations defined by interactivity and connectivity. This essay concerns the emerging field of web writing and digital rhetoric within the context of my practices in two recently-taught courses, as well as reflections upon the application of rhetorical theory and professional writing concepts on the web platform. ²

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 In this essay I discuss web writing in the university community by reflecting on two online courses I have taught at Mississippi State University: Writing on the Web (EN 4990/6990: Special Topics) and Writing for the Workplace (EN 3313). I will introduce the core strategies I have developed for the delivery of these courses I teach. I will suggest contexts from the broader concerns of rhetoric, technology, community, and learning that have impacted students. ³ I will also briefly explore the theoretical underpinnings of digital rhetoric and content strategy as these concepts apply in practical ways to web writing, interactivity, and the persuasive aspects of design. ⁴ Then I will give a few examples of pedagogy and evaluate outcomes relevant to the objectives I have considered. Finally, I will reflect upon the overall effectiveness of a number of approaches in juxtaposition with the overall context of the university, convergence, and the virtual public sphere.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 3 Overview of Digital Rhetoric and Web Writing
Current discourses about digital writing, including the capacity for public access to the Internet and interactivity between users, indicates a consensus about digital writing pedagogies that suggests we contextualize modes of writing from the standpoint of web writing theory. ⁵ In discussing web writing strategies and applications I will make a preliminary differentiation between “writing for” and “writing on.” Writing “for” the web assumes a facility with productivity software and a concern for design and usability; it also assumes an understanding of the writing craft as it pertains to levels of discourse. Writing “on” extends these capabilities by branching web writing into a dialogue that takes place in a digital space, which finds its discourse communities interconnected within a cluster of networked computers and servers, through which online communication opens the user to virtual worlds of social discourses about issues that matter to students as they transition from academe to the marketplace.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 Students today are faced with a convergence of technologies and communicative forms—language and media—that blur traditional disciplinary boundaries and genres, genres such as the graphic novel, video games, and remixed multimedia documents. Henry Jenkins, in Convergence Culture, recognizes digital rhetoric as a “participatory culture” that grows from its “collective intelligence.” ⁶ Users find that the nature of collaborative communities fosters civic engagement. ⁷ Convergence impacts literary reading, discursive writing, and digital rhetoric in ways that underscore student interactions attuned to new global realities where virtual space supplants physical space and the temporality of dissemination is reduced to an instant. ⁸ Digital connectivity becomes an example of how new-media convergence and learning illustrate ways students adapt to the postmodern reconceptualization of the learning community, an adaptation that impacts their own learning goals.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 A cursory survey of the field suggests that web writing involves, on one hand, professional writers who have developed best practices for content development and design that meets the needs of users of government and corporate documents, practices that can be assessed through usability testing, and writing that is characterized by its transmission from writer to reader. On the other hand, through the capabilities of hypertext and the convergence of media, another cluster of genres of web writing has arisen emphasizing the capacity of web software to provide a platform for user interactivity that is social in nature. User groups and communities spring up to interactively discuss any number of topics; consumers contribute product reviews for the benefit of other consumers; political sites form grass-roots communities to further their participation networks.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 2 The interactive web, or Web 2.0, relies on cloud technology where digital data storage resides on host servers, allowing document retrieval from any computer on any browser. ⁹ The impact of Web 2.0 on the university learning community has been significant in that classrooms have become virtual learning spaces. Moreover, digitally-enhanced learning also allows students to experience the way web writing works by shifting writing from traditional essays to web-based documents. As a consequence university learners become immersed in web writing practices that are current in the workplace, in social spheres of communication, and in the political public sphere. This immersion, moreover, has the potential to create greater openness and opportunities for collaboration and “collective intelligence” for learners from differing socioeconomic backgrounds. ¹⁰

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Web Writing Courses
In the spring of 2011 I attended the Center for Teaching and Learning’s CTL 101, Best Practices in Online Instruction, at Mississippi State University, a four-week course designed for instructors. By simulating the online student’s learning experience, the course demonstrated that online instruction involves rethinking the teaching environment. My work in teaching web writing involves undergraduate students learning technical communication and rhetoric in interdisciplinary situations. Writing for the Workplace students, for example, collaborate online to discuss problem-solving strategies in workplace case narratives. Through writing, students discover that these case narratives are not simply concerned with document and content strategies found in technical communication discourse communities, but that they also delve into issues involving ethics, multicultural discourses, and interactions between users and technology, interactions deployed by user communities which mediate rhetorical aspects of the virtual public square. In Writing on the Web we extend these concerns by exploring web writing from three interrelated vantage points: writing content (design, strategy, and usability), online rhetoric (persuasion, interactivity, and dialectic), and convergence (media, ethics, and social responsibility).

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Writing for the Workplace
I began teaching Writing for the Workplace in 2008, an upper-division and interdisciplinary intensive-writing course that fulfills core curricular requirements. The course therefore reaches a diverse population of students. The course was initially designed by Dr. Rich Raymond, the Head of the Department of English at Mississippi State University. At his suggestion I adopted Mike Markel’s Technical Communication, now in its tenth edition (published by Bedford/St. Martin’s). ¹¹ As I taught the course over a five-year period I was glad that students responded positively to Markel’s emphasis on the rhetorical fundamentals of audience and purpose, and that they realized how persuasion takes place in rhetorical situations that arise in cultural spaces such as the workplace and on the Internet.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 1 Because the course is an ongoing activity I will shift to present tense. Using Markel’s chapter cases as a framework, students in Writing for the Workplace begin the semester by analyzing résumés. They reflectively consider how measures of excellence influence the way they see themselves as future professionals. In our classroom work, students employ collaborative group-work techniques. ¹² They divide the given case issues and documents into structured sections, role-playing the narrative’s scenarios and personas, and then they organize the writing of documents in layers pertaining to the needs of the actors in the narratives. ¹³

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 1 We then turn to ethical questions concerning the ways students view the fairness of subsidizing plagiarism-detection software. As writers begin to think about revising in productivity software environments they consider the limits of automated editing tools, and think about their own concerns for their ethos as writers. As students turn to collaborative writing we consider how to effectively critique the writing of peers in positive ways by developing rubrics for heuristical analysis.

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 We also consider cultural issues that impinge upon the goal of effective collaboration. At this point students encounter the potential issue of scheduling issues in collaboration and what counts as fair distribution of work. Students must decide how to treat the team member, the group, the project, and the project manager fairly and ethically. To resolve such issues, students write a persuasive recommendation email to their team and receive feedback from their peers as to its effectiveness. As students begin to consider networking in their professional lives, we cover the use of social media as an instrument of community building, a goal that leads to writing audience profiles and writing computer-user scenarios to begin the process of thinking about usability. These skills extend to issues arising in job networking through social media. Extending the idea of networking, as well as anticipating the proposal project that is a major assignment in the course, students learn effective interviewing. They create a questionnaire, revise questions to clarify their audience and purpose, and conduct an interview.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 In Writing for the Workplace students write case documents based on basic document conventions, documents using well-chosen organizational patterns that exemplify good macro-level critical writing choices. Students share their work in online peer reviews by emailing the group PDF attachments. We develop rubrics for effective critique. In their strategies for revision students become aware of the audience-centered need for a balance between clarity and diplomacy, and the strength and logic of their arguments. Since their audiences are represented by workplace personas in scenarios student writers learn to acknowledge the role of culture in persuasion. Students develop their revision skills by close reading passages and then revising them for specific audiences and purposes based on criteria they cull from the cultural scenarios at hand. The also revise documents for ease of use in translation, being aware of the ways multicultural audiences read, socialize, and enact their contractual obligations. Students thus write across cultures with specific purposes, audiences, and rhetorical situations in mind, situations requiring diplomacy and problem solving.

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 2 Building upon these rhetorical principles, students then consider elements of design and graphics to compose web pages for multicultural audiences, and they learn principles by which they test the usability of web page designs, graphics, and hyperlinks. They develop critical evaluative skills by creating “decision matrices” to score their options and choices. After a visit to the Instructional Media Center where students learn to build web sites, they launch into their proposal projects, through which they propose a campus organization, learning opportunity, or service-learning program. In order to understand the rhetorical goals supporting an effective proposal, students need an understanding of their proposal’s audience, a matter which becomes fundamental to the purpose of the document. At the beginning of the writing of their proposals students interview their informants and develop audience profiles and action scenarios, through which they understand their audiences and purposes through role playing.

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 2 Beyond writing in the conventions of proposal writing, document arrangement and structure—executive summaries, process analysis, evaluation, writing and persuading for their recommended outcomes, all part of the ethos of their effective writing—students design their proposal documents using design elements as purposeful elements of persuasion. They approach design knowing that their proposals will be published online. They recognize the need to develop web pages for usability and readability. In this major assignment students learn through critical thinking that underscores their rhetorical goals, to set agendas, milestones, write in conventional formats, write descriptions and summaries, and organize presentations logically by using “advance organizers.” They publish their proposals in an interactive website illustrating the “one-to-many” model of hypertextuality.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 Writing on the Web
In 2010, as an extension of Writing for the Workplace, I began researching the implications and pedagogies of digital rhetoric. With Dr. Rich Raymond, I began designing an online writing course for upper-division students. I developed a bibliography, wrote a course proposal draft, and taught a pilot course titled Writing on the Web in the spring of 2012. The course was conceived as an online writing-intensive course for majors in the humanities interested in an interdisciplinary study of digital rhetoric, convergence culture, and persuasive technology.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 In Writing on the Web we covered the persuasive nature of technology and convergence by studying the relation between people, computers, and media, and the interactive behavior that takes place in the digital rhetorical situation. We created a press release/brochure and a blog/website as our major course assignments. In light of digital persuasion we studied visual rhetoric and design strategies and their consequences for usability and interactivity, as well as the issues of ethics in persuasion and the implications of intellectual property. Finally, we explored the ways web writing on the digital platform impacts community and the public sphere by understanding convergence as inherently participatory, a rhetorical situation that juxtaposes audiences, media, and popular and political modes of communication.

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 I assigned students discussion post questions that I devised from various chapters of the text. I also assigned Cynthia Jeney’s Writing for the Web and derived a number of exercises and assignments from it. ¹⁴ For example, from Jeney’s book I asked students to create a glossary web page defining terms appropriate to a site they selected. Then, following Jeney’s text, students created content for a website for a campus organization they were interested in. They used audience-oriented design concepts, developed planning and compositional strategies, and created user documents to accompany the project. They began the web-site project by using online text and drawing tools to create a mock-up of the site, in turn creating and writing appropriate content as they built the site.

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 2 In Writing on the Web students read Baehr and Schaller’s Writing for the Internet. I asked students in discussion boards to paraphrase passages relevant to topics for their website assignments and then comment upon them. ¹⁵ For example, I asked, how does the web transform writing? One student responded that web writing is transformed by convergence: “convergence has often been referred to as ‘a place where media forms collide’. More precisely, it is more of a place where media types interact, overlap, and gather.”

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Students discussed and responded to issues of page design and organization where content involves “chunking” and hyperlinking. In a discussion post a student wrote (internally quoting Baehr and Schaller), “chunking ‘involves writing and adapting content that follows specific templates [and] structures, as well as specific design and content specifications.’ Writers use chunking to generate content that can be reproduced for a variety of media, such as print, video, presentation slides, or the web through the use of single sourcing and remediation. By creating this content and storing it properly, writers can ‘source’ it and ‘remediate’ it for future use.” ¹⁶

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 3 I also asked how the realm of the social shifts due to web writing theory? Another student responded critically: “Certainly our world’s understanding of technology has increased (and is increasing) exponentially, but Baehr and Schaller seem to be asking a bigger question: Has our world’s understanding of itself increased? In other words, are we better people, smarter people, or is this technology reducing us to ‘just pointers and clickers?’” I asked students to respond to the issue of intellectual property. Another student wisely said: “Digital content creates problems by being both identical to the original and too different from the original.” This evidence of critical thinking illuminates the sorts of concerns students discover as they work in web writing.

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 Core writing strategies
Web writing, says Ginny Redish, focuses on the ways people read and use web content. ¹⁷ The emphasis on the term “content” stems from the ways writers design web pages by emphasizing the economy of writing that distinguishes current practices of designing hyperlinked pages that provide pathways to associated topics. This content approach to page design has in turn given rise to Content Management Systems (CMS) software programs such as CMS Made Simple. ¹⁸ Redish specializes in evaluating web writing to enhance usability and readability. ¹⁹ Redish applies reader-centered writing strategies that are premised upon the rhetorical bedrock of audience and purpose. She shows how web writers can assist the “conversations” web users have with web sites, and she is therefore implicitly dealing with the idea of persuasive technology, the rhetorical relationships people have with computers.

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 We have seen that web writing involves issues of copyright, ethics, digital literacy, community, and narrative. ²⁰ As web writers we consider the roles of audiences and writers in interactive communication, viewing writing on the web as a communicative platform pertaining to various discourse communities from academia to non-profit organizations. Students work collaboratively to produce web writing that is rhetorically effective and demonstrates high standards for usability. Many rhetorical situations that arise in web writing promote critical thinking through the analysis and evaluation of issues specific to the way users read documents. Most of the documents we discussed are web-based. Through writing case documents students encounter an ecology of writing in spaces native to the computer and the information-age workspace. Moreover, students discover that in the global reach of digital writing many of the issues of communication involve the way documents can mediate between diverse cultures and learning styles.

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 In Writing for the Workplace we dealt primarily with the relations between the contemporary workplace, its global connectedness, and multiculturalism, by leveraging a rhetorical approach to documentation and digital writing. In Writing on the Web we extended the discussion of digital rhetoric and web writing to include the transformation of online documentation to multimodal media, interactivity, and explored the social ramifications of convergence.

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 Outcomes
While it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the persuasive virtues of “computers as persuasive technologies” where the very design of computers and related devices become an “area where technology and persuasion overlap,” or where extensible markup language (XML) goes beyond hypertext markup language (HTML) by advancing from syntactical code to semantic code that is intrinsically structural, semiotic, and rhetorical in function, it becomes clear that “technical knowledge and rhetorical knowledge can work together in knowledge management practices for the modern information economy.” ²¹ And while usability and the persuasive aspects of technology built into the design and function of web sites can be studied empirically through the analysis of affective responses by focus groups, there is a wholly ethical side to a philosophy of web writing. Web writers need to be aware of the problems of copyright and intellectual property given the ubiquity of information and images. Moreover, the clarity and coherence of web documents has much to do with making information immediately and clearly comprehensible, and that motive is fundamentally an ethical one, since users often depend on web-based information that is accurate and honest.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 In both Writing for the Workplace and Writing on the Web my students became critically engaged in writing for specific audiences and purposes situated in case narratives where they role-played in scenarios involving workplace problem-solving through writing, revising, and creating and designing web-based documents. The outcomes for Writing on the Web flow from quintessential objectives. Students learned the historical and cultural development of new media and convergence theory, and studied how popular media has adapted to and captured the rhetorical possibilities within an emerging popular culture that involves social participation through digital interactivity. In order to situate that recognition we explored digital rhetoric, media literacy, and narrative theory in order to understand our audiences in various discourse communities, from public rhetoric and politics to participation in popular discourses that involve text, images, and audio in multimedia genres. Then we concentrated on the application of web writing for content strategy, visual design, usability, and interactivity.

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 An assessment of Writing for the Workplace involves measuring the effectiveness of teaching technical communication through case narratives in diverse workplace cultures. As students build skills in writing towards problem-solving in rhetorical situations that involve specific audiences and purposes, they build the skills necessary to write their proposal assignments that involve them in service-learning projects. I found that students met this project successfully and were engaged in the documentation of the project since they had become invested in its value by their immersion in their campus culture as a rhetorical field. Their social and global engagement was further deepened by their shared presentations on Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and their enthusiasm in sharing their proposals and other work online with members of the class. ²²

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 Writing for the Workplace and Writing on the Web utilized Blackboard course management software. Students used Google productivity software and their individual Gmail accounts. It would possible, indeed expedient, to use instead Wikispaces Classroom, which offers free cloud-based wiki resources for educators, including discussions, project management, calendars, writing tools, assessment, and collaboration with privacy controls for the moderator. ²³ In Writing on the Web my students and I recognized that the current interest in the read-write web (Web 2.0) influences writing practices significantly, but doesn’t necessarily displace more established online documentation practices redolent of the first generation of web writing. ²⁴ Many of the best practices established for professional web writing were developed in the 1990s, including web interface design, content strategies for online text clarity, menu conventions and arrangements, and the relation between readability and usability testing. ²⁵ Prior to the rise of interactivity and convergence, web-page designers standardized page functions (home and pathway pages), informational menus (about, help, and FAQs), and navigational hypertext facilitated through linking conventions. ²⁶ I came to view these two courses as layers of technical communication, one focusing primarily on online documentation, collaboration, and applications; the other, convergence, interactivity, and the way writers mobilize the social media.

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 In Writing on the Web students became invested in the theoretical grounding of online rhetoric as they traced the shift from professional writing and documentation in web-page design, to the possibilities for collaboration and interactivity, and further, to online rhetoric and the public sphere. Students recognized the opportunities and responsibilities of one-to-many writing on the web—the need for ethics and clarity—and they became aware of the digital public sphere as an enhanced possibility for social engagement, critical thinking, and career networking. Students drew positive value from the application of web writing concepts through the design and structure of web documents that concern issues they care about. Indeed, web writing, which involves both professional and social writing online, offers an enhanced academic writing experience that connects students to their university communities, reinforces their aspirations, and helps facilitate their social commitments. Moreover, web writing makes an appeal to disciplinary unity by bridging technical communication and online rhetoric: it is the very interdisciplinary nature of web writing that opens corporate writing to rhetoric and the social turn.

¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 About the author: Dr. Peter B. Olson teaches as a lecturer at Mississippi State University in the Department of English. He specializes in nineteenth-century American literature, cultural studies, musicology, rhetoric, and the digital humanities.