Writing for the Web

Composing, Coding, and Constructing Web Sites

J.D. Applen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136925887
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Kommunikationswissenschaften

Writing for the Web unites theory, technology, and practice to explore writing and hypertext for website creation. It integrates such key topics as XHTML/CSS coding, writing (prose) for the Web, the rhetorical needs of the audience, theories of hypertext, usability and architecture, and the basics of web site design and technology. Presenting information in digestible parts, this text enables students to write and construct realistic and manageable Web sites with a strong theoretical understanding of how online texts communicate to audiences.

Key features of the book include:

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• Screenshots of contemporary Web sites that will allow students to understand how writing for and linking to other layers of a Web site should work.

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• Flow charts that describe how Web site architecture and navigation works.

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• Parsing exercises in which students break down information into subsets to demonstrate how Web site architecture can be usable and scalable.

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• Detailed step-by-step descriptions of how to use basic technologies such as file transfer protocols (FTP).

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• Hands-on projects for students to engage in that allow them to connect the various components in the text.

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• A companion website with downloadable code and additional pedagogical features: www.routledge.com/cw/applen

Writing for the Web prepares students to work in professional roles, as it facilitates understanding of architecture and arrangement of written content of an organization's texts.

Chapter 1

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Old media, new media, and knowledge

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Chapter overview

The purpose of this chapter is to raise awareness of how the major communication media that have been in use in the last 2500 years allow us to shape and receive information and knowledge. The spoken word or oral communication of the ancients, the written word of yesterday and today, and the electronic word that we encounter in using contemporary technologies all have distinctive capacities to convey ideas to audiences and affect the speaker's or writer's ability to understand the ideas she or he works to convey. This is important because as writers and information architects we need to be mindful of the idea that the technologies we employ are not neutral.

Speaking, writing, and literacy

The most compelling idea in Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy is that “More than any single convention, writing has transformed human consciousness” (77). “Human consciousness,” for humans at least, is just about everything, and when the advent of writing is identified as the most significant catalyst for the development of human consciousness we should stop and reflect on this idea. All the things that we think about and are aware of might be a good way of understanding what constitutes human consciousness.

In today's culture we are told by people who are trying to sell us new technologies that the “information age” is the most important period in the history of humankind, but communication technology was not invented in the 1980s. We need to recognize that writing too is a technology, even though it might be hard to imagine this today, given that pencils and paper seem like primitive artifacts when compared to computers and network technologies. Writing is a technology because it exists outside of our minds; humans needed to invent an alphabet and something to write with and on so they could record and see what they were thinking, and this was an extraordinary achievement. However, what contemporary communication technologies have given us is also remarkable. Anyone in the world can send “mail” to anyone else in the world instantaneously, and we can present ourselves and the organizations we work for across the globe via our Web sites with great ease and efficiency.

“Orality” is the word Walter Ong uses to characterize speech, and “literacy” is the word he uses for written language. Ong not only characterizes the nature of orality and literacy, more importantly he explains how both of these methods of communication affect the way we think and understand our worlds.

Before we began writing things down, approximately 2500 years ago, communication was all oral and thus based in sound—which is obvious, but according to Ong, the sound of language is still one of its prominent characteristics today, even though much of what we communicate with is written discourse. Ong takes it further when he states that “thought itself relates in an altogether special way to sound” (Ong 7). Perhaps we can understand this as, when we read something today, whether it is a book, a Web site, or a text message, we can “hear” the language we are reading as if it is being spoken.

The vast majority of languages being used by people today exist only in oral form. We might be surprised by this, but there are small populations of indigenous peoples in the world who have retained their oral languages without written components. The grammatical rules of “natural human languages” that are spoken and heard come into being long before these languages are studied by grammarians and linguists and then written down and taught to people in schools.

By contrast, the “grammar” or syntax of computer languages can be designed before they are used as they are based on the abstract logic of technology, rather than on the day-to-day needs of people who are working to communicate with one another (Ong 7). Usually computer languages are for relatively simple pieces of data, not abstract human concepts; describing the satisfaction we experience in the company of our friends or family or why we like the music we do cannot be reduced to a number or one-word designation found in a database. The rules or grammar of computer languages can be designed to accomplish a known set of tasks, and, once designed, can then be put into machines to carry out these tasks immediately.

Think about some of the common expressions you use that, while they have meaning, are difficult to convey logically. Go to urbandictionary.com and find an expression that can only be explained by relating it to the context it is used in, not by the actual logic of the sentence or the literal meaning of each word in the sentence or phrase. How difficult would it be to program a computer to understand these expressions and use them correctly in natural human speech? For example, how would you explain the phrase “That's how I roll”? How might it be different than “That's how I do things”?

“Natural human languages” develop over time; new words or ways to express ourselves come into play oftentimes as slang, and because of the fact that people use new words and expressions and they are understood by others in their community when they do. These new ways of speaking gain respectability as they successfully convey meaning and thus become part of the “official” language and are written down in dictionaries. For example, “google” in the sense of “to google something” started out as slang, gained widespread use, and can now be found in respectable dictionaries. It made sense to enough people in our culture that this was a good word to use, perhaps because before it was a verb it was used as a proper noun: it was the name of the most widely used search engine, Google, and “to google” allowed people to distinguish easily between just searching on any search engine and searching on Google. We will be discussing this “social construction” of language in more detail in Chapter 4.

Ong tells us that people in oral cultures do not learn like people do in written cultures. Learning in oral cultures is based on the practice of apprenticeship, where people imitate or emulate what others do as they are doing it. For example, people learn how to hunt by going on hunts and emulating what experienced hunters do. This has to happen in real time; it is not some- thing that is read about in a book before people go out and actually do it. While oral cultures are analytic in that people in them need to work to find words and phrases to describe things and ideas, people in literate cultures, according to Ong, “study” things because written language allows them to carefully examine ideas that are arrested in words; students and scholars can keep poring over a sentence or passage that explains a thing or idea at their own pace, reflect on the meaning of each word or phrase and the sequence of words, and then come to the overall meaning of what has been written. For example, if the last sentence was not quite clear to you, you could go back and reread it and think about such things as the meaning of each word as you understand it and its relationship to the other words in the sentence, the sentence's syntax or arrangement, and how the punctuation marks served to convey meaning. Yo u could “study” it, as Ong would say, or move on to the next sentence if you so choose.

In speech, communication is not arrested in time, and unless you can remember exactly everything that you have heard, it is more difficult to reflect on than a text that has been written down and that you can keep going back to, a text that has not changed. Ong describes the inability of members from oral cultures to understand such things as “geometrical figures, abstract categorization, formally logical reasoning processes, definitions, or even comprehensive descriptions, or articulated self-analysis, all of which derive not simply from thought itself but from text-formed thought” (55). Imagine studying concepts in chemistry such as redox equations or ideas in government such as the Bill of Rights without being able to “see it” in a language that is written down. Regarding the “study” aspect of writing, think about some of the things you have learned by imitating others and other things you have learned by reading about them. What was the difference in the learning process between the two? What kinds of things are best learned by reading versus emulating the actions of others?

Ong tells us that in oral cultures “knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective administration” (23). The Greeks around the time of Plato were the first to fix oral speech in written form, and by writing things down they could move on to other things; they did not have to spend so much of their time and energy remembering what they had just heard, as people do in oral cultures: it “freed the mind for more original, more abstract thought” (Ong 24).

In an oral culture people took in literature and philosophy and other important ideas by hearing it, not reading it. In the “Phaedrus” (ironically a written text) Plato lamented the loss of the practice of oral communication because he thought that we would lose our ability to memorize things if we began writing ideas down: “For this invention [writing] will produce forget- fulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory” (140). If something was written down, we could read it, put it down, and come back to it later if we needed to, but we would lose something by doing this. Actually, when he writes this, Plato uses the voice of Socrates, who is in dialogue with a man named Phaedrus. Plato believed it was through the give and take of such questioning and answering, or what he called “dialectic,” that we can best present our ideas and demonstrate how ideas can be generated and examined. This is also called the “Socratic method,” which Plato learned from Socrates. Plato believed there was something special about the dialectic method as it was dynamic, whereas writing lacked this character, and we can see this expressed in Socrates' answer to Phaedrus:

Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of a painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it was written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs a father to help it; for it has no power to help or protect itself.

(140–141)

Written words, however elegant and specific, just sit there on the page, and if not understood or challenged have “no power to protect themselves,” while the language of two or more people exchanging ideas allows them to change and clarify their words as they make adjustments for their audiences. Think about some of the things you have written that others have read. When they have reacted to what you wrote, you might have clarified something that you thought they misunderstood by rephrasing your words or adding to it in some way. In this way, you defended your writing, but you could not have done this if someone read what you wrote and you were not there to engage them. However, because the act of writing requires the use of a technology that exists outside of our mind, it is unchanging, fixed, and removed “from the living human lifeworld” (Ong 89). The written word lives on forever, which is ironic given this characterization, whereas words that were spoken in lively but evanescent debate, and never written down, are dead (Ong 80).

Some would say that the blogs that are today prevalent online, which are based on the written word, in some ways also model the spoken word of Plato's age. Yo u can write something out, and others might respond to it in a way that shows that they did not really “get it” the first time or they may present challenges to you. Yo u can come back relatively quickly with a clarification or even a refinement or modification in your thinking in a process that is akin to the dialectic method.

According to Ong, the written word also allows us to produce more “abstractly sequential, classificatory, explanatory examination of phenomena or of stated truths” (24), as a writer can take the time to go back and carefully craft her sentences until they reflect what she is really trying to say. People who come from literate culture transfer the communication patterns they have learned or “interiorized” from the practice of writing to the way they speak (Ong 57). People who have never learned to read and write would not have internalized the sentence patterns that writing allows. For example, a “writer” can more readily produce a long sentence that includes such elements as dependent clauses, independent clauses, phrases, and lists separated by commas, colons, semi-colons, and dashes, because the writer has a chance to write a sentence out, reread it and think about how it sounds and communicates, then go back and rewrite it, much as this writer has done—and has had to do—with this sentence. Someone from an oral culture cannot do this as readily as someone writing sentences out with a pencil or pen, or, even more enabling, using a word processing program which invites writing and rewriting. Because of this, a literate person's speech adopts some of the patterns that are found in writing. This does not mean that we always speak like we write, but writing does have some effect.

This is not to say that oral cultures do not produce “complex and intelligent” texts (Ong 56). Before oral cultures were studied to any extent and consequently given some respect, many scholars assumed that, as it was so “skillful,” Homer's Odyssey must have been a written text, not spoken, reflecting their failure to see how “sophisticated” and “reflective” an oral text can be (Ong 56). Before the Odyssey was written down, it existed as a set of oral narratives that poets would memorize and deliver to an audience. The methods used to memorize such large bodies of text were based on knowing the meter or required poetic rhythm in every line. Meter served as a mnemonic device, a method allowing us to remember longer texts; the repetitive rhythm of each line in an epic poem suggested to a poet the next word or phrase. We are using a mnemonic device when we are working to remember which letter in our alphabet comes before the other when we sing the “ABC song”—whether out loud or silently to ourselves—which is melodically and rhythmically identical to the song “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

How much play or improvisation existed during the time of this oral culture, before Homer “wrote down” The Odyssey, is not known, but Ong describes studies of living oral poets from the Balkans who recited epic poems that, while they had the same basic story and content, changed in every oral presentation (59). This allowed the poets to be “original,” as they might alter some of the specific words and phrasings for each audience and situation, but still to present the “traditional materials effectively” (59). While this is oral literature, presenting it in this way is a sophisticated practice. In fact, when such poems are written down the inventive thought processes of an oral poet are lost to some extent. When an “illiterate” poet eventually learns how to write something down, “it introduces into his mind the concept of a text as controlling the narrative and thereby interferes with the oral composing processes” and thus “disables the oral poet” (Lord, quoted in Ong 59). The poetry is written down, arrested, and that is that.

In today's culture, the implicit power of the written word is evident when we go see a movie that is based on a book we have read. We will often make judgments about how the movie fails to live up to the specifics of the book as opposed to taking into consideration that the director of a movie might have to use a different medium to tell the story and thus use different methods to convey the ideas of the “original” text, the book. However, sometimes the book is just better, and sometimes mediocre books can be made into good movies.

Ong distinguishes between several kinds of orality. “Primary orality” describes the way people spoke, heard, and thought before the age of literacy. “Secondary orality” describes the speaking and listening skills of people influenced by their literate background, or how anyone who could read this sentence would speak and hear things (11). For example, if someone has been exposed to written texts with long, complex sentences, punctuation marks, and embedded phrases, he or she will oftentimes speak longer sentences that have the same kind of structure and pauses signaled by such punctuation and structure; to some extent, our speech patterns sound like written sentences. People who have never learned how to read or write the language they speak would speak differently. This kind of speaking would probably also require that those who have not been exposed to the written word have not been around people from secondary orality-like cultures and thus been influenced by hearing them. There are not many people living today who would be in this group.

Secondary orality is perhaps best exemplified by what we hear on radio and television, where people are speaking but often reading from prepared written material. Network newscasters read from teleprompters and look into the camera as they speak, seemingly establishing eye contact with us and perhaps providing the illusion of a spontaneous presentation of ideas based on the memory and inventiveness of the newscaster, but this certainly is not the case and the communication is thus different from primary orality. These presentations are perfect or near perfect in terms of expression and punctuation, but this is because they are based on carefully prepared and edited written texts. As we are influenced by texts that we hear, we work them into our own speech patterns. Secondary orality is “more deliberate and self- conscious” because it is “based permanently on the use of writing and print” (Ong 134). Technologies such as radio, television, and telephones are media for secondary orality-style discourse, and their output could not be manufactured without the existence of the written word (Ong 134).

New media and literacy

Richard Lanham believes that ...