5/10: Writing on the Internet (Advanced)

Okay, so the research paper (P3) is done! That paper is worth 25% of your course grade, and it's done now. Over. Whew. So what do we do now?

Well, there's 2 more course weeks and one more major assignment, so here's what the last 2 weeks of this class look like:

This week: Today, we're going to talk about how to adapt your research project to an online audience, using the class Wix blog as a practice space. This is also the most important blog post, since it adapts your most important paper to an online audience of your peers.

Then, on Thursday, we're going to cover the last unit in this course: visual rhetoric and analyzing visual media. We'll talk about visual rhetoric, how art, Instagram posts, and ads work in a visual and rhetorical sense, and then you'll write the last graded paper--P4, the Image Analysis essay--over the weekend.

Next Week: The last class of the whole semester is peer review for the P4 Image Analysis paper. And then our ENGL110 course is over, except for course evaluations and all the grading I have to do.

Let's talk about the P3 blog adaptation.

Blog Adaptation as a Genre Choice

This blog is due Sunday, 5/16 by midnight, though since you'll also be working on the future P4 assignment, I recommend doing this blog during the week.

In this blog, you'll be adapting your researched argument to a much shorter, more concise, online post with your peers as the target audience. Even if your peers weren't the original audience for your research, this blog adaptation is about explaining why your research is important or interesting to your peers.

If you remember way back to the beginning of the class, in the Writing on the Internet (Basics) class, we talked about genres, discourse communities, and rhetoric. In the background were two other concepts we didn't talk about, because they're more specific: affordances and attention.

Attention is the thing you need to capture in your readers to accomplish your goals (hence the English idiom "paying attention," imagining your brain-time as a commodity you give to specific things that make a good case for being important), and affordances are the features of a medium or genre that shapes what you can do with it. Writing on the internet has a lot of “extra” affordances when compared to writing conventional papers, including:

The ability to use more images, moving images (.gifs), and embedded video.
The ability to format things more unconventionally.
The ability to reach a different or more diverse audience.
The additional requirement to compete with other things for the attention of your audience.
The ability to network socially, and to link things together (literally, with links).

Perhaps the most obvious example of affordances that we have right now are the asynchronous structure of this class: not meeting in a classroom at a specific time, and having me talk about all this stuff in person, has benefits and costs--online classes have different affordances vs. face-to-face ones.

This includes physical limitations (I can't gesture in this blog post, for example, except to write something dumb like *gestures vaguely*) and content limitations (it's way easier to include a YouTube link in this post than if I, like, read a URL to you in class, for example.) Professionals choose their genres based on the affordances of the genre and the audience best reached by it.

An Affordance Tragedy: The Story of Vine

RIP Vine. It was the TikTok of its time, only actually it was kind of better because it didn't have really sketchy data retention policies. What happened to Vine?

Well, it got bought by another social media company, who shut it down and took its ideas. But that's not what killed Vine. Vine died long before it got bought, because it ruined its unique affordances. How?

Originally, Vine clips were limited to 6-10 seconds with audio and video, and looped automatically. This strangely limiting form created Vine's special cultural usefulness--jokes, video memes, and musicians creating really interesting music that flawlessly looped every 6-10 seconds. It was great because it was so limited. The affordances were very restrictive, but this limitation made Vine special and useful for a certain genre of content.

And then they added features and let people make Vines longer than 6-10 seconds, and it basically turned into YouTube but with a bad UI.

Meanwhile, Vine gave us such treasures as the verb "to yeet," meaning to throw something with force*. It was originally the name of a Vine dance trend thing, but then a single Vine changed our entire language forever:

(Note: not the original, since the vine is long-gone. Also CW for some swearing, oh no.)

Affordances aren't just limitations--they're what make certain forms and genres special and useful, allowing them to present different content more effectively to different audiences.

*Fun grammar fact: Yeet has already developed a formal grammatical role. "to yeet" is a transitive verb, meaning you must always do it to something, hence "I yeeted myself out of there" works but "I yeeted out of there" does not. There remains some heated academic debate on whether the past tense of yeet--meaning, to have been thrown forcefully away--is "yeeted" or "yote."

If you're interested in a hilarious history of Vine, MarshallDoesStuff made a surprisingly good one recently, which you can watch here (not required for class).

Yeah, Okay, We Get That You're a Millennial Who's Nostalgic for Vine. What About the Blog Adaptation?

You should adapt your P3 research paper to the blog and post it on the class Wix site by Sunday, 5/16 at midnight. It should be less than 500 words, and I recommend doing it early. Think of it as a sort of poster-presentation, but less terrible: a chance to share your research with your peers.

Think about what kinds of audience you want to capture, and how you want to present your findings, your thesis, and your stakes in a very short, online format.

Advanced Concepts for Digital Writing

Since the blog post is significantly shorter than your original research paper, you can’t just copy-paste the thing on the blog and call it a day. In many ways, this blog is like the earlier P2 Proposal, except that the proposed paper now exists. It’s like an ad, meant to highlight the best features, convey the same message, and reach an audience of your peers. It inhabits the same sort of relationship as the Buzzfeed article about a study does to the scientific study itself.

The length means you’re relying on a concise, powerful form of your thesis, maybe one great proof/example, and a clear statement of stakes and goals.

The first and last thing in that little list: a concise thesis and a statement of goals, could conceivably be a single statement. The one great example (called a conceit in literature classes, where it means "an extended or central metaphor" but in rhetoric it means "a single approach or central example") is used to tie your mini-argument together. Because you only get one, pick your favorite or the one most likely to hit audiences hard: the best case study, the best result, the most important stake of the argument, et cetera.

But what about the other ingredients of rhetoric? Here they are, in brief:

Ethos in digital writing is conveyed through production value and linking. Production value is a term referring to how “professional” something looks--how few errors it has, how easy it is to read or view, and whether it looks “janky” or not. Linking is basically just citing your sources or referring your readers to outside content if they want to know more.

Logos is conveyed through the conceit and careful organization and audience targeting. Short, well-pointed paragraphs, good use of visuals, and a strong central example.

Pathos is established in the tone and with your choice of conceit and a good call-to-action sentence at the end. Humor is also often used in digital writing to either soften the blow of scary ideas or to emphasize their seriousness through contrast (a.k.a. juxtaposition).

In terms of organization, brief, highly specific block paragraphs, like the kind in these lesson posts, are good. Long paragraphs work in a research paper but are bad for the screen. Quotes are less effective than paraphrasing, and should be pointed and brief if used at all. (Instead, refer your readers to outside sources via linking.)

Visual elements, like charts, pictures, or videos, help to save you time on explaining things in text and engage readers whose attention may not connect to print as much as to visuals (you map/chart lovers know who you are.) Even just a simple picture now and then can help keep eyes on the screen. More on that in a second.

Strategies and Approaches

Start with a powerful statement that establishes your thesis and why they should care about it.
Instead of wasting time explaining a lot of background, give a one-sentence context. This sentence should be specific, not just “the issue is hotly debated.” Use a favorite background source, maybe, and tell people where they can learn more.
Refer people to outside sources for better explanations, if they want more detail. In other words, don’t quote or explain much, but use hyperlinks or directions to tell them where they can learn more.
Pick your conceit and deliver it: one detailed, impactful case, example, or source that makes the main part of your thesis.
State the stakes, and then connect people to solutions and orgs (it’s called social media because you can connect people to stuff).
Use visual elements, like charts, graphs, images, or YouTube clips, instead of long-winded text explanations, where feasible.
Use a good title, and highlight key terms of the discussion with features like bold text and stuff. Using key terms help with SEO (search engine optimization), making your content more likely to generate traffic. That's partially disabled for the class blog (which is a "safe practice area"), but IRL it'd have big impact, like using the right hashtag at the right time on Twitter or Insta.
A lighter, more approachable tone lets you deliver stakes in an easy-to-digest but impactful way. Combine “fun” or “cute” in the post with an ending that gets really serious.
Make sure each word, and each sentence, is audience oriented, meaning it’s there because they need it, not because you want it.
Use short paragraphs. No paragraph in this class post, for instance, is more than 4 sentences.
End with connecting your readers to actions they can perform.

#10 is very important. Audience attention wanders.

A Note on Visual Elements

Image/video positioning matters, and where an image is in relation to text changes its role. To keep it brief:

images on the left establish context for text nearby
images on the right clarify or react to text nearby
images in the middle take the place of text.

Look at the image below:

Image captured by me. Wikipedia, “Hauntology”

Notice how the black-and-white image in the Wikipedia entry relates to the text: the image is on the right, so you notice it after the text. In this case, the image is a side-example or clarification.

However, the relationship between the above image and this lesson post is different: this example image of a Wikipedia article is in the middle of the text, as if it were a paragraph. Indeed, you treated it like the next step of our discussion, not as a side-note.

The image-text relationship changes based on visual position.

In Wix's blog post editor, you can adjust the positioning of an image by clicking on it, which brings up this context menu:

Those buttons can change the size ratio and alignment of the image.

More on how visual rhetoric works next week, but for this assignment, definitely try to use some visuals to assist your text.

Homework and Thursday's Class

Do the blog post, make sure it’s up by Sunday, 5/16. And also do the quiz for this class on Canvas.

Thursday's class will cover the short, final paper for this course: P4, the image analysis paper. More on this then, but basically, you'll have Thursday's class to internalize the concept, the weekend to draft it, peer review on Monday 5/17, and then the final is due on 5/23.

[Thursday's class is available already--I posted it early to give you more planning flexibility.]